ADVENT DAY 15 * DANIELLE VOGEL!

UNTIL ALL I CAN REMEMBER IS BEFORE AND AFTER THE WALK 

To enjoy the meat, you need to learn how to skin a woman:

1) Lay the animal on its back.

2) With a sharp knife, split hide from sex to throat with a shallow cut. 

3) At the sex put your pointer and middle fingers between the skin and the thin membrane just beneath the skin. Your palm facing up, your fingers like a pair of scissors. Do not cut. Lift the skin from the membrane.  Use the knife with the blade upward. Cut the skin.  

4) Be more forceful when you reach the ribs. Remove your fingers.  Use your knife only.

5) Make cylindrical cuts opening at the inside of each leg. These round cuts should meet the center slice from throat to sex.

6) Now cut all the way around the neck.

7) Tug. Begin tugging the skin away from the animal’s body. Roll the animal onto the loose skin, and then do the other side.  

Case Report # P07-1236

From where he first. The pressure of his. I still flinch to cut. He touched.  Was is this hard? Harder. This? No, much harder. Look into the camera now.  Was it like this? Did he grab you like this?  

It was hard enough to break a fresh egg, she says to the camera. A fresh egg, I say. 

Let’s go through this one more time. Yes, I say. Thank you, I say.

To attend and give testimony, 

Tear here:

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DANIELLE VOGEL is a book artist and cross-genre writer. She is the author of Between Grammars (Noemi Press 2015), Narrative & Nest (Abecedarian 2012), and lit (Dancing Girl Press 2008). Her visual work has most recently been exhibited at RISD Museum, The University of Arizona Poetry Center, and Abecedarian Gallery. She is currently a visiting writer teaching poetry and book arts at Brown University and creative nonfiction at Wesleyan University. 

Curatorial note: The following poems are a response to a call for poetry about rape culture for the annual Delirious Advent Feature; the call is in turn an immediate response to the Rolling Stone story “A Rape on Campus” about rape culture at the University of Virginia. However, they are also part of a larger conversation about rape in poetry communities. Curated by Jessica Smith and Susana Gardner.