Graham Hillard
Between the Body and the Mind

She makes no distinction between the body
and the mind and tells me so, defying me

to posit the limbs as subject to a will
not their own, a shard of permanence strapped to them

like a parachutist’s pack, the veins conduits of what,
if I’m right, must be some real meaning. This is

what frightens her, this disentangling of lusts
from their means, the weight of what might, after all, be

choice, as if one could take the body apart,
part the ribs, unwind the fat guts and find

at the end of them a human voice praying
to itself.

If My Body Were

if my body were
If my body were clay
and shaped by some
restive hand, would I
feel the lingering
impatience as a wound?

Here? Or here?
Then again, why
not make it flesh,
soft ground? -- this
strange movement, this
cacophonous sound

<< Back to Issue 14, 2010