 Qoph
David Harrity
Search me, O God, and know my heart… –139th Psalm
I always thought your message was about solidarity until this moment. You swing
your axe and slice me down my middle, clean through my spine, splitting me
like a fresh log. Reach across my chest and into my body—know the anatomy you made.
You begin by perusing the hairline of my skull, and then squeeze my sponge of brain,
the side responsible for this poem, but not my belief. You move down to my eye, tap
behind it like a fish clinking into his glass wall. Touch the wave of my tongue—half
an arrowhead—then run your knuckle along leather skin, the inside of my cheek. Down
again, sliding the tip of your thumb through the valley of my trachea, where my words
used to flow up and erupt. Even though you don’t want me to, I ignore your touch
to my heart—I can’t yet bear the darkness in the tiny chambers. Go to my lung, squeeze
an alveoli just so I can hear the pop, strum your fingers down all twelve shelves of ribs,
like playing the guitar—music, even to the untrained ear—then slide the arc of the last
to grip the shaft of my backbone, slick and cool as a fireman’s pole, which will lead
you to the thick snake of my intestine. Then I’ll know the true descent, between my shit
and my pelvis, where you put your fist to the ball and socket of my hip swathed in sinew.
Reach to yank the bar of my femur, spin the dial on the combination lock over my knee.
Then to the smooth stones of my heel, the foot bones arranged like cracking plates
of Pangea, the sharp dart metatarsals hold strong enough for me to keep my balance
so I don’t tip and fall to the ground, like the cleaved half of an apple, sweet symmetry facing upward. Father, I see you’ve already cleaned the axe even while you’ve been busy
touching me. I want repairs—you’ve found every last one of my weaknesses. You
want me to take this a bit more seriously? I’m half the man—fine, I’ll stop—maybe
I shouldn’t finish that thought. But humor won’t bind me back to whole. I get it—
make me new again. You want me to say I need you. I’ll ask for a needle and thread.
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Terra Incognita or Drawn
David Harrity
What if you discovered
your body to be
a souvenir—that your bones
were borrowed
from the flesh
of another country.
That you aren’t
so much accident
as arrangement—
your cells placed
in precision
and exact folds of tissue.
What if you realized
that your difference
isn’t difference but connection
to the distance of another
waiting sea.
If you found an atlas,
would you be brave enough
to find an axis,
to see your country’s silhouette
sagging into water?
To trace the seaboard
onto paper?
Would you mark
each coast—to guide and find
the lines
that bind
your body
to your bones?
You are
more than simple flesh,
more than just a graphite sketch,
You are an adoption
of sound—
a roar
of water—
one ocean crashing
into another.
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