This body
is the tight weave of a suit
succumbing to the dry-cleaner’s steam,
a vein-laced envelope marked Return
to Sender, palimpsest of hits and hands.
This body’s a necklace of hard adjectives
ricocheting off lowered garage doors
lining our alley. It’s a neuron transmitting
substation, a heliodrome landing pad,
a duct-taped shoe at the cardboard box’s
flapped entryway, a volley of compliments.
This body is a semi-permeable membrane,
the skeletal frame of a skyscraper, a bird
with fishing line entangling its throat.
This body hunts and haunts and haints.
It’s a passageway for songs and saints. A giant
screw grinding a tunnel through a mountain,
shist sifting down its far slope, men’s sweat.
It’s a top-shelf bottle collecting dust, a box
of cheap wine gushing into a teenager’s open
mouth. This body is buoyed up on words
that ferry me back to the river of praise
that once bathed me. This body blesses
as it’s blessed. It harbored addictions
and hoarded would-be friends. It haggled
over prices, kept tallies and scorecards
in relationships it could never commit
itself to. It wagered its beauty on the scale
of other’s tongues. It crashed knees into
hardwood and begged whatever was
beyond it to enter. This body relinquished
what it thought it knew to become a vessel,
conduit, hollowed reed, flute—container
for the uncontainable. And when it quit
demanding, it received. When it stopped
looking without, it traversed shadowlands
within. It unearthed an overgrown garden,
mom’s Singer sewing machine (foot-pedaled)
in a pagoda hung with bolts of cloth, statues
with missing items in holey hands. It saw
a blue-toned infant, unmoving. This body
stains its feet crushing grapes in a tub.
This body’s the skins that empurple its
soles and the wine it drinks. And when this body
comes into contact with other bodies it wants
nothing from them. Healing hurtles and
crawls along its long halls. It paints interiors
the olivey green of waiting rooms. This body
has become a morgue where caretakers
usher in survivors reverently. It lets them
take all the time they need to be with the ones
they’ve lost—the ones they’ll never lose. Those
bodies touch the hands and lips and hair
of the stilled bodies. This body houses bodies
who’re traveling light, and those yet to depart.
— David Allen Sullivan
Former Santa Cruz county poet laureate David Allen Sullivan’s books include Strong-Armed Angels, Every Seed of the Pomegranate, a book of co-translation with Abbas Kadhim from the Arabic of Iraqi Adnan Al-Sayegh, Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet, and Black Ice. He won the Mary Ballard Chapbook poetry prize for Take Wing. Black Butterflies over Baghdad was selected for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection by Tim Seibles, and published by Word Works, while Seed Shell Ash—a book of poems about his Fulbright year teaching in Xi’an, China—is forthcoming from Salmon Press. He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter Gulch Review with his students.
