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Anita Bernstein is a law professor on the faculties of Emory University and New York Law School. She has published poems in Atlanta Review, Orbis, Oxford Poetry, and Swansea Review. |
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Published Spring 2006
 
Incitement to an Uprising
I used to pull dolls' dresses over their heads
and off their slippery flesh. Nothing underneath.
Although I didn't know a word for no nipples
I could show you how to spin one thigh the wrong way,
point their toes to face backwards, peel off a shoe,
watch eyelids fall down like a theater curtain,
then up again when you shake. They'd stare forward
reproachful when I left them for another slice of plastic
who too would land splayed in a pit. The mass grave
that preschool boredom digs. Nana diverted me,
I'll tell you now. Ice cream, new crayons, a lily-pink dress.
Mobilized, roaring with rage, they can form Special Forces.
Draft my brother's G.I. Joe, also stripped naked but game,
to join their charge. Plastic bodies stand up in the abattoir,
murmur, stretch to enlist. Blue circle eyes roll to find comrades
in the basement, the hall closet, floorboards of the station wagon.
Tell your stories, nod those cream-white orb heads.
Pivot your leg straight to a jujitsu kick when you remember
everything I did to you and don't remember I did.
Sometimes when you're down temporarily for some count
you reckon you can make allies in dispersed anthills,
find a recruit in the wreckage of throwaway toys
and broken projects. Swivel your head round to see
cheer in a corner. March to a skinny drumbeat you'll hear
when it rattles, like twigs on a hillside shelf.
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MR BOOKS
Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.
Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.
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