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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One Nov-Dec 2026.
Impact, poems by Susana H Case.
Impact
I was walking on 57th Street, on my way to a book party, distracted by an
upcoming vacation, when a woman I hadn’t seen acting strangely swung at
me with what looked like a metal-beaded cat o’ nine tails. She scratched
my glasses, but only bruised my face, then faded away without a word into
the crowd. No one on the street stopped to see if I was okay. I wiped the tears
from my eyes and continued to the venue. I was subdued—it wasn’t my party.
People seemed to be enjoying themselves. Maybe I ate a few more pretty pastries
than I otherwise would have. I didn’t notify the cops. I’ve never found them helpful.
Friends told me later I should have, and I hope that doesn’t make me responsible
for whatever that angry lady did next. Even now, she might be wandering around
midtown with bizarre weapons. I’m still curious how she got that way. But one of
us lives in the universe of cause and effect, and one of us doesn’t.
“If I Am not Grotesque, I Am Nothing”
—Aubrey Beardsley
Mary Ann Bevan (1874—1933) was a London woman afflicted
with acromegaly, too much growth hormone in the pituitary glands.
Mary Ann enters and wins a Homeliest Woman contest, joins a traveling fair
in England, ends up at Coney Island’s Dreamland with Zip the Pinhead, his
tapered cranium, and Lionel the Lion-Faced Man, covered almost completely
in eight-inch hair. At fairgrounds, sells picture postcards of herself to pay for
her four children’s education. Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey hire her—
want an ugly woman to display, but nothing repulsive, maimed, or disfigured.
She smiles at visitors who gawk at her size twenty-five hands, size forty-four
shoes. Within two New York years, she reaps more than one and a half million
in today’s dollars, finds romance with a giraffe keeper performing at Madison
Square Garden named Andrew.
Vanitas
After Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida
by Ivan Albright, 1930
When you model at nineteen—wife, mother—
he revises you into bulbous, sagging flesh.
Seated cross-legged in the painting,
dressed in funereal frill, your powdered
décolletage—to no avail.
Trucco isn’t good enough for trickery,
the treachery of age has nullified makeup.
How you appear is what will happen,
this soon-to-be mulch.
The tomorrow of death is what appeals to me,
the artist wrote. Oh silk, oh slip, oh money
on the furniture—did he imply
you were a slut?—oh high heels,
cut flowers in a vase, your days, too,
are done. Rug and table tilt precariously.
Ida Rogers—this is how the painter
renders you, when you laugh
at his words, his ode to your perfection.
Your flesh is the color of a corpse.
Are you pointing toward heaven, Ida?
Susana H Case is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently, If This Isn’t Love (Broadstone Books, 2023). She is co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Milk & Cake Press, 2022), Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and with Margo Taft Stever and Sandra Yannone of Unsinkable: Poetry Inspired by the Titanic (Salmon Poetry, 2026). The Scottish Café (Slapering Hol Press, 2002) was re-released in English/Polish as Kawiarnia Szkocka (Opole University Press, 2010) and in English/Ukrainian as Шотландська Кав’ярня (Slapering Hol Press, 2024). Her tenth book of poetry, Matinée Girls, is forthcoming in 2026. https://susanahcase.com
