Anthropology 101
Our professor, red-eyed, disheveled, blew her nose, announced to the class that her good friend—lover, I thought—charged with murdering his wife, and without an alibi, had just been found not guilty. The verdict, the professor was adamant, forgotten ethnographic text in hand, restored her confidence in criminal justice. Students nodded, closed their notebooks, looked up again when she admitted her certainty that he’d done it. Something roiling in him, she told us, whenever he talked about his marriage. I believed she was right: he probably did do it, femicide having such an intimate face. She told us it was a good thing a jury had erred on the side of innocence. Then she brushed her hair and applied red lipstick. We opened our books to the Ituri forest people, how these short-statured men climb more than 100 feet into the canopy to collect honey from the bees, the product they most prize.
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Susana H. Case is the award-winning author of nine books of poetry, most recently, If This Isn’t Love, Broadstone Books, 2023 and co-editor with Margo Taft Stever of I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, Milk & Cake Press, 2022. The first of her five chapbooks, The Scottish Café, Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in an English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press and is forthcoming as an English-Ukrainian edition. Case is currently a co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. susanahcase.com
Probably I don’t get most of it but like the poem and the flow of it. Once I started reading I forgot it was a prose poem. Almost like a haibun and kept me waiting for the haiku in the end. Lovely read.