Revive the Archive: Jenn Crowell’s “Anastasia” (1995)

Revive the Archive is a weekly series that brings new eyes to previously published works. This week we look at “Anastasia” by Jenn Crowell. This piece was originally published in volume 2 of The York Review.

We’ll see how fast you’ll be running.

We’ll see how brave you are — Tori Amos

The world at two a.m.
sucks on its silence
as she laces buttons
on corsets of jewels
that may well save her life.
Her eyes are those
of her own executioner —
grim at 19, lost in that dour cubicle
where doors open and close and rifles
click, bayonets are drawn
as the tableaux of family smell
shoulder to shoulder heats up
with a flash of childlike screams
slick with rain and bursts of light.
Later they find her in Germany
trying to jump off a bridge, skirts
swirling, body flying
in an arc like the soul of that executioner
and hitting the outer limits of the universe
in freefall, numb to their shouts
and the release that follows
angry to be alive, unable to
feel anything but the dank water.
She resurfaces with no more than a name
in itself a victory, saying: I am.