Claudia Cortese, "The Red Essay" and "Twine Essay"

by Daniel Egnéus

The Red Essay

1)   Setting: The barn. Sometimes, I can’t remember if there were stars, fall air clear or smoky,        
      the shape of the moon’s face.

2)   I read Perrault’s moral to my students: Attractive, well-bred young ladies should never talk to
      strangers, for if they should, they may well provide dinner for the wolf.

4)   Afterward, Bill died, and I was glad. Afterward, he sang Meatloaf to me and I held him and  
      laughed.

1.5) Other times, I can see the barn door wide open, grass below soaked in starlight. I could have

        screamed or clawed. I dreamt saltwater
        taffy, sister’s sticky kiss, how we kicked
        pigeons with our skirts over our heads.

        I worried that he’d feel rejected.

3)   I said, Let’s go back to the house. I’m cold. Please. Bill whispered, It won’t take long. I won’t go   
      in all the way. We negotiated. What do you name that?

6)   Angela Carter writes, The wolf is carnivore incarnate, and he’s as cunning as he is ferocious . . .  
      If a wolf’s eyes reflect only moonlight, then they gleam a cold and unnatural green, a mineral,
      piercing color. If the benighted traveler spots those luminous, terrible sequins stitched         
      suddenly on the black thickets, then he knows he must run.

2.5) After I read the Perrault quote, a female student says, When a slut at a party gets drunk, it’s
       different than being attacked in a park. The class murmurs in agreement.

5)   I didn’t compare myself to women choked and beaten,
      cut from the night and left to pavement.

                                                                 To compare, one must have a basis for comparison—
                                                                 to know the common denominator.

7)   I bought a stack of poetry books at AWP. A wolf stalks speaker after speaker. Sometimes he
      hunts her, his spittle gleams like a knife. Other times, he awakens her animal body they grow
      tufted and furred they sniff and paw and wild and oh it’s so good to be beastly be free.

8)   If we say he is evil dress him in fangs and lice tell our daughters don’t stray from the path carry  
      mace and listen beyond heel clicks hold your keys like a weapon don’t enter the empty lot if we   
      tell ourselves we can keep him out by staying at the hearthside lanterns burning like yellow eyes
      in each window if we blame beer and red laughter how she glittered his way the look that
      invited him in then we can say: it cannot happen to me, I can’t be a victim, and I am never the  
      wolf.

(Previously published in Mid-American Review)

Twine Essay


7)   In 1991, the world burst
      open—a bright umbrella    

      of mall dates and bike rides and
      I promised my sister Natalie, I’ll trampoline you

      if you swingset me and whee!
      swished through summer,

      left one girlhood and entered another—
      red lip-prints on mirrors, became

      girl heroes, wasp queens.
      We blushed ourselves clean, rose

      to our cool thrones.

8)    Setting: my sister’s basement bedroom.

1)   According to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Snow White is an angel in the house of 
      myth—the heroine of a life with no story, while the Queen is a schemer . . .  an artist—

2)   a witch who declares,

      I’m the hand tearing the girl’s pinafore—
      glistering vowel, ruby in the tree: dusk’s red teeth.

      I’ll stick a needle through each eye, cut a square in my skull
      to let the daemon out. Like spider’s eggs, White’s specters

      will hatch on my tongue.

9)   We dolled our faces—
       wanted our pores to close like mouths.
       We loved any bridge over water,
       any wreath marking the highway median.

10) Nat and I would creak the door open after mom
      had fallen asleep, circle the street—in love with the dark

       that rasped us both. Like braided beanstalks, we’d watch
       Headbanger’s Ball, share a tub of cookie dough, eat our weight in Nestlé.

       A boy once pointed to Nat, said, Mommy, that girl has bee stings
       covering her face, and I wanted to build us a moat, wall away his stare.

3)   Before Snow is born, her mother spends her days
      at the open window, watching yellow eyes

      glow from the forest, the kingdom’s crash
      of color and venders. She wraps

      a shawl around her shoulders,
      breathes horse dung and honeysuckle,

      then motherhood replaces her bustling world
      with a mirror.

5)    The claim that amazes me most: Snow White is not the daughter. The Queen wants to kill
       the Snow White in herself.

4)   Narcissism: to close the window gaze in water broken sun the hung curtain shards of white skin.

11) Natalie showed me the Ouija
      she bought at Toys R’ Us.
      We palmed the pointer. Ghost girls
      told us they slept in snow castles,
      stuck to each other like cobwebs,
      and death is all gauze and orgasm.
      We planned our suicides,
      slept in Pop Tart comas.

6)   In other words, mother, Queen, and White are one—

      part glass girl and beauty
             queen, terror
                         show and kindly mother—

       when the witch offers White the poison apple, they eat it together.

13) Nat began to stair-master away, shrinking
      to a bone-shack, and I built my cellulite castle and prayed
      we’d come unbraided.

12) When Nat and I heard garlic pop in the pan, we knew mom had begun the daily feast. Our table       disappeared beneath basil-flecked mozzarella, spaghetti and pomodoro, three loaves of bread.   
     
      We watched dad demand mom bring the salt, pepper, the San Pellegrino as he told her,     
      you wouldn’t understand you never listen don’t interrupt me,
    
      which meant—you’re stupid you’re stupid you’re stupid—
      and we angels didn’t say anything.

14) I didn’t know how to say—
      to be twined so tightly you know

      if one dies, you both will—the horror
      —my sister’s body.

15) What does it mean to be monstrous?

16) Mom insisted we teeth
      the skin from a butternut truffle,
      she watched its center dissolve

      on our tongues.
      She fluttered from dust mop to cleanser, 
      any task to keep

      hunger away, though at the time
      I thought she just liked 
      a clean kitchen.

(Previously published in Black Warrior Review)

(Image above by Daniel Egnéus) 

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Claudia Cortese’s first full-length book, Wasp Queen, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2016. Cortese is also the author of two chapbooks: Blood Medals (Thrush Poetry Press, 2015), a collection of prose poems, and The Red Essay and Other Histories (Horse Less Press, 2015), a book of lyric essays. Her poems and essays have appeared in Best New Poets 2011, Blackbird, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review, and Sixth Finch, among others. The daughter of Neapolitan immigrants, Cortese grew up in Ohio and now lives in New Jersey, where she teaches at Montclair State University.