Poetry: One hundred little deaths by Rachel Mann Smith
Rachel Mann Smith wants to see, wants us to see, the women whose value is so often treated as a joke: “the joke is us dying / in art like we do in life.” In tight, energetic couplets, the poem rushes at the intersection of art and violence to seek out the “hundred little deaths” lost in their collision.
One hundred little deaths
after 100 Little Deaths by Janaina Tschapes and Untitled (Volcano Series #2) by Ana Mendieta
All the woman here
are face down limbs
broken in neat collapse
all the women here
refract prismatic
in pools of glossed-out paper
all their faces
buried and I wonder
about my own death
with these faceless women
playing here at dying
lying on a soft beige beach
in Montauk on deep pile
80’s carpet in ugly
sweatpants in uneven rows
of freshly cut suburban
grass these tessellate
brown bodies young
and dressed or undressed
pressed flesh into
landscape turning slowly back
to soil and seaswell
in each my eye
imagines the sinister
just beyond the frame
how else does a young woman
die but by every jealous lover’s
hand
A man stands too close
behind me and says
I don’t think this
is supposed to turn me on
And then he laughs
which is to say
he knows we’re good
for a fuck or a joke
the joke is us dying
in art like we do in life
like we don’t see Ana
in the next room
her single silhueta,
white coffin ghost
in a handmade volcano
vaginal and erupting
frame by frame Ana
whose husband pushed her
from their window
34 flights up
whose husband
is still is free and famous
in his old age
I can’t help it I wonder
did she feel the terminal
velocity in her face
singing her sickly
ground ward
here the final frame
is another brown body
limbs collapsed face buried
unseen, Oh Ana — I see
Rachel Mann Smith
Rachel Mann Smith is a physician and poet living in Atlanta, Georgia. She received a BA in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work is forthcoming from Little Stone Journal.
