The Problem With Anatomical Thinking—
by Meridian Johnson
2016 Winner, BLR Prize for Poetry
The corpse is invented and now
little birds sit pecking at it. What they lift
from the shadows is not a body in bits. Look again,
feel the birds balling up the body-thread with their beaks, disregarding
the smell, unwrapping it into a thing of this world, carrying spools of body
back to the body. Around the whole of it:
oaks, maples, tuffs of grass.