Two Poems by erica anderson-senter

TWO BODIES TOUCH IN THIS POEM 

 

Maybe the bodies in this poem are my body: 

one now in my office chair looking occasionally at night. 

One when I cried and cried 

myself sick in the groaning hours of grief. 

I barely remember my body then, but I’m sure 

I had one. The milk of memory is thick, 

but somehow I only see my tired hands,

my ribs and, hear me, I had far too many ribs.

They multiply with sadness—each bone honeycomb

and bees flew from my mouth.
That body is foreign to me right now

in this moment. I’m looking through that door:

all my bodies line up like country men 

in the French hills ready to cascade 

through tall grass. Somewhere I am still small. 

Somewhere my tongue is in my beloved’s mouth 

for the first time, his hand on my back. 

Somewhere I am old with wisps of hair braided
and bones again. These days my poems are all

bones and neck and I-am-in-grief-lost-in-time.

I can never anchor. Somewhere I am the anchor 

and freshwater lungs; blue-gill swim in circles 

around me. Once I swam in the sun: hair whirling

out, alone—tiny lake-dust pillowing up, 

light on my greenskin—hum of water-silence:

alone in that body then—and now, right now.

I’M SORRY IT HURT; I’M SORRY YOU WERE ALONE

How long did you breathe shallow
Did you breathe shallow
Did panic grab you

Where did panic grab you first 

Where did you feel it last

Which part was warm 

Did you remember 

Do you remember 

Did you know your heart was stopping 

Where did it hurt 

How could I know 

How can I know

Why did you lay on your left side

Did you think of that New Year’s Eve when I wore 

stripes and you a blue collared shirt and a friend

grabbed a picture of us smiling, your hand

on my hip, your head tilted, smiling face-

to-face- and all the hope glowing

What is a new year

or a day or even one slim minute without you

I wanted you to get better

What is better now 

Where you are

What do you see 

I am nearly blind.

erica anderson-senter

Prose by Mark Young

Bona Fides

 

When I entered the country, I told the immigration authorities I was a gatherer of bones, a polisher of stones, adding that I didn’t mind if the activities were reversed.  They were sceptical at first, doubting that these were legitimate occupations, but a search confirmed it so they let me in, muttering that there were cemeteries for the first, rivers for the second, that if I didn’t find a job within three months I would be deported.

 

When I applied at the employment office their records revealed that it had been years since they’d last had a vacancy for the lines of work I laid claim to.  In the meantime however, there were part time jobs available in either an ossuary or a quarry that might help keep my hand in while I waited.

 

Which is how I wound up cataloguing storage bins of bones.  A set of threes — three floors of a building in the old part of town, a common repository for the relics of three orthodox religions, & which encompassed at least three centuries of active accumulation.  It was an eclectic collection, incorporating anything that had the slightest connection with the religions without concern as to the provenance of the items.  In the first few days I recorded five femurs supposed to have come from the one saint, discovered that polydactylism seemed to be a prerequisite for beatitude, that to become a patriarch in the fifteenth & sixteenth centuries demanded a bone in the penis. I was especially intrigued by the relics of someone identified only by a sigil, whom I nicknamed Saint Fibonacci because of the way the number of his metacarpals seemed to increase, & who, it was rumored, wasn’t even dead yet.

 

Despite all this I started out with good intentions, sought diligently for the correctly labelled specimens to complete skeletons which were then interred in perspex coffins in a reliquary that had been specifically built for this purpose several years before. Then expediency — & the fact that there were so many unidentified bones lying around — took over.  I began to fill in missing parts, but still maintained the integrity of my own records, staying clear of scientific fraud in my determination to become the Bertillon of bones.  But the fact that the papers I wrote appeared in non-paying journals whilst the reliquary drew an ever-increasing number of customers finally changed my attitude.

 

I began selling to traditional Chinese medicine outlets bone fragments guaranteed to extend life expectancy.  I crossed over from The Journal of the Proceedings of The International Conference of Osteopaths to The Southern Enquiring Truth with articles such as "Widespread syndactylism a generation removed disproves the myths surrounding Saint Epimenides the Celibate." & then the activity which caused my dismissal, bringing out a calendar in which each page featured the bones of a saint whose day fell within the month, probably because of the context in which I placed them: "Miss July seeks solace with the ulna of St. Theophrastus."

 

I have been working at the quarry for three months now.  Very soon, a burial plot for a previously unknown schismatic seventeenth century sect will be discovered, complete with contemporary artifacts, their age able to be confirmed by carbon dating.  I have learnt well.

Three Poems by harry stammer

haiu-qt seared #40

 

p y e q a

i g s n t c p

o x f r b

haiu-qt seared #39

 

t k m f u

s t h e t p s

s l n g o

haiu-qt seared #38

 

z j y e q

a M c t a n o

a k z f r

harry stammer