April Poetry: Asking the Body
Poem #13 for National Poetry Month
This is another of those spontaneous poems that seem to spring fully formed from the head of Zeus.
Every day at lunchtime, I take my anti-rejection medication and eat my lunch. An hour later, I’m sprawled out on the couch trying to sleep off the effects of the drugs. Usually I become drowsy, then unbearably tired, then I fall into a slumber that holds me prisoner for an hour or so. Try as I might, I cannot stay awake. It’s as if I’d taken anesthesia. When I wake up, I stumble around the house sipping tea and nibbling a snack until I become awake enough to function.
During that refractory period when my mind emerges from its cocoon and its wings are still damp, I sometimes get a flood of images and poetic ideas. Usually, I’m too tipsy to make much use of the inspiration and scribble snippets of verse that are illegible later. But there are times when I can sit down and make use of the whispered words of my drunken muse.
I present you with the fruit of my afternoon stupor.
Asking the Body If I let the soft animal of my body love, and self-love is accepting my body, but that same body keeps the score, how do I know if I'm winning? When the bright-sharp pain between my wingbones pins my spirit to my heart until it threatens to rupture my breastbone and rapture the ruby-throated hummingbird of desire to a flight of fractured geometry – all corners and angles acute to a point without any curves to soften the blow or calculate the average in the bell-shape of my soul – how does the clapper of my tongue beat the bronze bell of my mouth, knitting the thread together, hook and loop, into the semblance of a poem? Where do the winged words go once they fly from my heart, up my throat and burst from my lips in a chorus of feathered promise? Why do you make a nest in your heart, encourage the words to roost and remain in your thoughts, giving them a second life in you?
Originally published in Flare Magazine 2/14/25.