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That Body - Poem
Literary Review, Summer, 2000 by Ann Keniston
I have never seen that body though I touched its coverings, point-heeled, point-toed shoes, gigantic silky pairs of underwear. It keeps promising to abstain, to modify its behavior, stop pouring poison in, but it is already svelte, thinner than svelte, it is a hummingbird blurring before the feeder, more insect than animal. It wants to be mortified, to suffer plaster wrapped around the rib cage, a wire grid linking tooth to tooth with just enough space for breathing because humiliation might turn it into an object of desire, so it has required my loyalty, taught me to quaver over its most breakable constructions until I adopt its limping hip sashay, learn by heart its topography of injured flesh, each bone fracture, each half-healed tear of skin.
Ann Kenniston's poems have appeared in North American Review, Kenyon Review, Antioch Review, and elsewhere
COPYRIGHT 2000 Fairleigh Dickinson University
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
