Emma Goldman-Sherman (she/they) believes in the power of language to confer healing and agency on readers/audience. Their plays have been produced on 4 continents and are podcasts at The Parsnip Ship and Playing On Air. Their poetry is curated at American Athenaeum, Oberon, Queerlings, Non-Binary Review, and others, and their flash is forthcoming in the latest Fish Anthology.
“I saw Rose Wylie’s Pink Pig and Sausages, Homage to Retablos painting (2020) at a gallery in New York City in 2022. I love the way Wylie provides a narrative for the viewer—including the line ‘the butcher turned his head to look at my legs’ painted across the piece—which I felt compelled to explore as a series of clues: what she puts on display, how what is painted is objectified, and what that feels like.”
I’m a cow to him
colored raw sausage
beside fat rolls of wieners.
Butcher slashes his own wrist
his knife severs hand from arm
toward my high heels, white light
call it holy. If I’m the woman
am I waving at the butcher
for a turn or blowing him
his blood? Is he the cow
on his hatchet/machete
beneath yellow holy light?
My breasts emphatically
swell beneath the canvas
butcher’s one-eye blind
while light beams white
as a virgin is holy.
My breasts press holiness
my tiptoed fate. Blind him
the ones in line for steaks
blinded by breasts
misunderstanding.
Skin folds between my legs
as cow carcasses hang.
Flesh packed into pork intestine.
Not looking where he lands
blood pours out a bright alarm
call it blinding,
in the white pleated dress
holding up my ticket
a kiss? Is my lipstick
with a blister-lip
floor pooling gore.
What makes it holy?
Stretch the white fabric
stretch the moment
in his piratey eye-black
said to be holy
and a virgin wears white.
Into the butcher’s other eye butchering
finally enlighten all
he makes to feed haters
I’m cowed and utterly bloody
the holy.
