Hansel or Gretel
I can’t claim to have been too surprised on hearing that my past
was on fire and I could only
save one thing. I couldn’t decide
between the time I read about an actor dying at the peak
of her earning potential and the time
we were all invited to join our employer’s annual
NO GAIN CHALLENGE, which incentivized remaining
within one percent of one’s weight each holiday season.
I couldn’t decide between how my boss
used to hover in the lunchroom, clocking the contents
of my sandwich, and the time you
called me HANSEL OR GRETEL, whichever got assigned
by the gingerbread witch to the cage; you could
never remember. At one lunch everyone was talking
about a pop star who would alter
her look all the time through color or cut. Often she wasn’t
recognizable right away. I’M HER RIGHT NOW,
I wanted to say and then rip off my face
for the reveal, like in Mission Impossible. But I wasn’t her,
though I too was always changing.
I was like the Ship of Theseus, if the rate of replacement
of the planks on the Ship of Theseus
was under one percent per holiday season, which it certainly might
have been; I never checked. The local industrial
smokestack vomited steam. The air was dry. The sun
was like an oven. Go on and get inside.
Copyright © 2025 by Natalie Shapero. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 12, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“A big question for me is, if I were to rip off my face like in Mission Impossible, which technique would I employ? There’s the massaging of the temples that leads into the peeling down of the face, a sequence of gestures that initially appears pensive before turning sinister. There’s the bottom-up removal that starts at the chin, like taking off a sweater at the end of a long day. And, of course, there’s using the dominant hand to grasp the opposite lower corner and then whip the face across and out, brandishing it like a weapon.”
—Natalie Shapero
Natalie Shapero
