Two poems about the body by Leah Falk
Issue №55
Lines after my vasovagal syncope
Here it comes again, heather sea
that surges the shore of my vision
each time the nurse fits my vein
with needle and pump, or
at the bone-click of cervix
clamped open. Brain’s signal
lost to the heart, vert.
unbound from horiz., I make
my own static, a broken
focus promise. The display —
my father’s hope-blue irises,
some distant Irish uncle’s flush –
goes colorless. The nurse offers
water, crackers, sour-apple candy,
but this is the way the animal
I keep in the cage of my bones
rehearses its death, this is its day
of atonement. Or day of geologic
remembrance. Slow fade to before
the earth knew of invasion,
before the body was something
to measure and prick. Flashback
to the world without seams
or borders, to the woman who,
walking a rutted path, first felt
my future cells stir. Flashback
to the ocean first seeing itself
in the sky. To the river I cross
every morning, which looks back
at me like a child who knows
I am lying; knows the window
that divides me from water, flecked
with the memory of hard rain, is easy
to break. Floaters, the doctor says,
are the jelly of the eye trying
as it imitates the shape of each
object’s wish to be seen. Emulsion of fear
and desire, water clouded with starch.
What else could be left of the world
after passing through the body? I come to
in the waiting room, holding a plastic cup
of my breath. Plastic the receiver, the rememberer:
on your colorless veil I’ll write my life. Lymph
makes its rounds again, makes a fist
of refuse. The nurse stands watch until
my vessels fill again with my heart’s
constant broadcast, until my body
takes the shape of its container.
For the body
Alan Turing, age 16
is a machine, sharing its eyes
with the horse and the cinemascope,
blood with the gas engine, fountain pen.
What have I in common
with other living things? The moment
a dinosaur’s jaw cracked
in two — one half snapping birdlike,
the other ground to powder. We have
that. We have the objects in this room
where a billion years have come
and laid down on the tile, seeping
out the screen door and down the garden
drain. This parlor: dresser scarf — ashtray —
good light for reading — easy chairs
with ribbing. Moonstone bust of a mother,
a child rising out of her, mountain
from slip-strike. Although it hurts me, out
of a living line, out of stone or meat, I choose
myself again, again that is one of me, here
where my carriage grew vertical, where my fists
forgot the heavy ground. But your body, wedge,
remembered. Cartridge leaking color.
On the year’s white page, parting
black from un-black. I don’t feel much
like writing more today.
About the Author
Leah Falk’s poems and essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, FIELD, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She’s received support for her writing from the Yiddish Book Center, the Vermont Studio Center, and Asylum Arts. She lives in Philadelphia and runs programming at the Writers House at Rutgers University-Camden.
About Recommended Reading and The Commuter
The Commuter publishes here every Monday, and is our home for flash and graphic narrative, and poetry. Recommended Reading is the weekly fiction magazine of Electric Literature, publishing every Wednesday morning. In addition to featuring our own recommendations of original, previously unpublished fiction, we invite established authors, indie presses, and literary magazines to recommend great work from their pages, past and present. For access to year-round submissions, join our membership program on Drip, and follow Recommended Reading on Medium to get every issue straight to your feed. Recommended Reading is supported by the Amazon Literary Partnership, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. For other links from Electric Literature, follow us, or sign up for our eNewsletter.
“Lines after my vasovagal syncope” and “For the body” are published here by permission of the author, Leah Falk. Copyright © Leah Falk 2019. All rights reserved.
The Animal I Keep in the Cage of My Bones was originally published in Electric Literature on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
