Cassandra Atherton
Chartreuse chanteuse
—for Holly Iglesias
I lost my virginity in a chartreuse dress. He misread the label as chanteuse, slipping the zip down my spine. I was la louche on his couch, hair spread out in a Titian halo, his pointy hip bones pressing me deeper into the white linen. My hand was cupped to catch the blood I’d heard would fall, rosary beads digging into my flesh from between his couch’s cushions.
I think I heldmybreath.
Afterwards, he picked up the white rose that had fallen from my hair, tucking it between the pages of his coffee table Bible. When I joined the communion line at Mass, I hoped that God couldn’t see the imprint of his ten Hail Marys on my lower back.
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Statement of Homage
Reading Holly Iglesias’s Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry (2004) changed my life because it made me think in new and highly inventive ways about my own practice as a woman and a prose poet. It is still the most brilliant work written on women and prose poetry today! After reading this book, I began to read Iglesias’s prose poetry and connected strongly to the themes around Catholic school, childhood, and history, in particular. In an interview with Angela Redmond-Theodore, Iglesias stated, “For me as a child, being in a church was a flood of sensual experience. In order to access memories of that time of my life, all I need is the slightest trigger—a flickering flame, whiff of myrrh, rattle of beads.” Iglesias’s books of prose poetry, her book of scholarship, and this quote are the triggers for my prose poem, “Chartreuse Chanteuse,” which is a piece based on a moment in my teenage years.
Holly Iglesias
Holly Iglesias’s work includes three poetry collections—Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World—and a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box. She has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She earned a master’s degree in history and a doctorate in interdisciplinary humanities and currently teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Miami, where she focuses on documentary/archival poetry.
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Cassandra Atherton is a widely anthologised prose poet and leading scholar of prose poetry. She co-authored Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP, 2020) and co-edited the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (Melbourne UP, 2020) with Paul Hetherington. Her books of prose poetry include Exhumed (Grand Parade, 2016), Leftovers (2020) and she is writing a book of prose poetry on the atomic bomb, with funding from the Australia Council. Cassandra is a commissioning editor for Westerly magazine, associate editor for MadHat Press and Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia.