In Retrospect
- In Retrospect
at the Alice Neel retrospective, Houston, 2010
The gallery was full of sofas, full of bedsand chairs, full of naked bodies,round pregnant bellies
taut to the navel.Naked wives reclinednext to husbands in slacks and ties.
Bellies swelled; the gallery was fullof horrible softness—breasts resting on stomachs,
pink areolae slipping off to the sides.The naked men were not better.They were many
and splay legged, all red and tender.I had never seen a naked man before.The room was also full of us,
studying the nudes.But we were hotly awareof our clothes—shirts
over breasts, jeans over hip bones.In the paintings we sawour own ribs, our thighs, [End Page 368]
and sharp, unabashedpubic bones. Self-Portraitas an Old Woman
hung on the way out,teaching us, softly,to be naked in our homes. [End Page 369]
aza pace's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in South Dakota Review, The Madison Review, and Moon City Review. She is the winner of a 2017 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry.
