Body & Isn't

By Bruce Covey 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, "Body & Isn’t" from Glass Is Really A Liquid. Copyright © 2010 by Bruce Covey. Reprinted by permission of Bruce Covey.

Source: Glass Is Really a Liquid (No Tell Books LLC, 2010)

Biography

The son of two chemists, poet and editor Bruce Covey was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, and educated at Yale University, where he earned an MA in English literature. Influenced by John Ashbery and Ron Padgett, Covey’s poems often utilize narrative and sequence, sometimes engaging found text, with both playfulness and urgency. Reviewing Glass Is Really a Liquid for the Rumpus, Weston Cutter noted that Covey’s poems “make sense, . . .

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