Of The Body
The common quandary
on display, that easy
trope
discarded in tombs of sentinel
ancestors, beckoning
to the other
side of the wildlife
tour, a tangled
relationship to urban
space
susceptible
to contagious
gods, slick
in their nuance.
I am bitten
off at the throat
I eat your autumn
weather and say it is
good
here is a sentence the body speaks:
bruised.
You are not in California
I have been out
of touch and you
an ache, I examine
all the places
I could have turned
and stitched you up,
my body in the jar
it created, how
I invents
itself next to you.
Essay
How often I forget everything
she does is done
in grief: the grocery list,
the laundry, her drive
to work—
how we coax
our bodies
into existence,
daily.
I want to know
extremes of my own
body, this
includes frailty,
includes vulnerability.
Is it enough
to say I offer
different kinds of waste,
present and absent,
to say I bury my doubts
opened and remade
in this instance.
The Fall
Nothing is
yet: impossible! Remove the removal,
how to: in flux, in fall,
where we dwelled. A pier
under sheets of ice, a boardwalk,
supposed,
buried in parts. The shore
frozen over,
let it be still, perhaps,
let it be a lake.
Water:
what is found if roads are taken
along ridges / all
the ways to the end
to sleep / to dream
impossible! Perhaps / perchance
in winter / a shadow
to borrow.
Composition
The day after you left, I buried
you, and set off to scatter
ashes,
full of air
and riverbed.
Here now, another you
come to take
your place, a subtle
shift, imperceptible.
In the evenings
two yous
align their threads
and take turns
weaving.
I intercede, still
rich and sweaty, covered
in dust.
It has been
a long climb, and the river
is swelling, even now.
What to make of this swelling,
I doesn’t know.
//
Emily Barton Altman is a poet and editor living in Chicago. Recent publications include a chapbook, Bathymetry (Present Tense Pamphlets, 2016), and poems in Parallax, wicked alice, and Foothill. She is a recipient of a Poets & Writers Amy Award and received her MFA from New York University. She co-hosts and produces the poetry podcast Make (No) Bones with her partner, Toby Altman.