National Poetry Month: Bruce Covey

Body & Isn't

(Bruce Covey)

I have a hard time making my mind take place.

Every input adjusts the chemistry—water, peppermint stick, analogue.

Kisses are circles. With eyes closed, every taste buds almond orange.

Ceiling defines the segment; door, the vector. Exits & entrances.

My location’s ribcage is beneath the changing spectrum’s breast.

Heft of a wet peony, white & pink, drips its honey south.

Conducted back, your body accelerates—biology of a taxi ride.

Kept kempt, migraines at bay, tidy nails, & sneezes away.

Sex through collisions—bridges jumped & limbs tangled.

Or the chromatic staff arranging the spheres’ accidental spills.

Frets & intonations strung across a tempered series of knots,

Strung through the loops of our virtual displacement.

But it isn’t wings or hooks or hooves or horns or see-through or white.

Whether afloat in a boat or aloft in a plane. The way maps affect time.

For a second I think I feel the fleeting texture of your skin.

Lumbar & sacral nerves descend to exits beyond the end of the cord.

Keep the blood in at all costs, even when the wind crackles its cells.

The coming of electricity, half next time & half this:

My five. My unending ache at the absence of you.

BRUCE COVEY will be participating in the Poets Falling in Love With Poetry event this coming Saturday night in Atlanta at Bound to Be Read Books. His previously published books are Elapsing Speedway Organism (2006) and The Greek Gods as Telephone Wires (1992) He is the editor of the online poetry journal Coconut and its sister press, Coconut Books. Covey has taught at the Atlanta College of Art and Emory University, His latest collection is Glass Is Really A Liquid (No Tell Books, 2010).