MY DEAR NAMELESS OF THE SEINE,

BY MONICA FUGLEI

Caught a glimpse of you last week in the manikin room,
tip-toed past a group gathered around the body that wears
your face, a protection circle, as if the light they shone in your eyes
some kind of candle magic to manifest the real of you
from the past, from the river, from the floating, from the dead, to
the today, into this rubber corpse, mechanical breath catching,
as a reignited heartbeat scratches itself into the screen
of their smartphone.

They never asked Are you okay? Never whispered Do you mind?
Never wondered Can we make a mask? Never implored could they
Copy it? Make you famous? Make you most-missed, most
kissed? Your unclaimed body, claimed, controlled, sold.

You are everywhere: your face on walls, CPR dolls, written in literature,
cross-stitched, encased in poetry, sold on Etsy, and I dream your no,

your eyes closed and finally they hear your no, your no in death smirk opening wide,
your no as purchased faces melt into waters your no, your river Seine bursting in no
rushing no through art galleries and Red Cross classrooms, your scream no, flooding
the world in no, in your no bursting from doorways, in the churn of dark water
pushing no into your death mask, your no into the sunshine, into fire and flame
into ash into no into goodbye into reclamation.

BECAUSE EVERY GIRL HAS A POMEGRANATE POEM IN HER

BY MONICA FUGLEI

I remember last summer: three or four
fruit lined up, 
how the French call them grenades,
their brilliant speckled red,
these tiny bombs.
 
I remember how I’d pull out the meal prep plastic – 
quart-sized, like a restaurant kitchen, 

then how, to music, I’d drag the knife 
lightly along the skin trying not to draw 
juice from the aril, how carefully I pulled
the fruit apart, catching any seed 
that fell. 

And here is where a poet would park metaphor or simile – 
              this fruit is knowledge, 
              harvest like murder,
              fruit blood red and bleeding, 
              fruit ripe like a thought, 
              fruit as fertility, 
              fruit as fecundity, 

fruit complex as the woman’s mind and
it’s always a woman isn’t it? With the cutting
and the work and the pulling and the intricate 
web of hanging on, 
her hands – my hands – 
around delicate skin 
barely holding this juice
to seed, and then my
crushing and 
pulping and

drinking, and I would harvest the work
to pass on to my children, would pause in the dripping, 
in the wasting, hands a deep crimson, 
this harvest collected moment by moment,

this quiet time in the kitchen, where
I ran a finger through yellow pith and packed each 
ruby seed in small food storage gently, thinking about death. 

Monica Fuglei currently teaches in the Department of Composition, Creative Writing and Journalism at Arapahoe Community College in Littleton, Colorado. A 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has recently appeared in Progenitor and Mason Street. When she’s not writing or teaching, she’s usually knitting or tweeting on #AcademicTwitter.