Joshua Corey is the author of two full-length volumes of poetry, Selah (Barrow Street Press, 2003) and Fourier Series (Spineless Books, 2005), along with two chapbooks, Compostition Marble (Pavement Saw Press, 2006) and the forthcoming Hope & Anchor (Noemi Press). He lives in Evanston, Illinois, where he and his wife Emily Grayson are expecting their first child; keeps a blog, Cahiers de Corey; and is an assistant professor of English at Lake Forest College.
Your Anatomy For Shame, It Is Form
We were songs. We were throats made from song.
We were skulls wearing caps of aluminum foil.
We were a flapped cadaver and the doctor's waistcoat.
The tango, the sarabande, the Jeremiad, 'Lijah's folly,
and that knock-kneed dance that multiplies kneecaps.
We were two hundred and six with detachable action.
We exchanged pelvises semiannually.
I presented a punitive bird and you slapped my wrist.
Two left hands. Stumblethumb,
you said. You stepped out from the black tawn,
replaced my chest with a textbook.
I refused to stoop to you level.
I was only lips on the stoop.
I was a life support system for a scream.
I was a brain in a vat of Fresca.
I was an eyeball in a ziplock bag of eyeballs.
i was neuron, twitch. I was detached.
You straddled past and put me in your pocket.
Kept walking. You burst into sun
and disapppeared. You left me string.
Me sandpaper. Me Philips screwdriver.
You left me nearness of tool. You took the tool.
The Cyclops
She would like to free her ankle
to reach a roof
under trafficking stars.
She would like to pass between mirrors—
advertisements for death—
and see a wing flutter
in the corners of her eye.
But the tea is hot and random
and brilliant with milk.
The handle cinches round her finger
snug as a metal band—
flakes of sugar on her lips
scar to sexual light.
In the aquarium
she did not know she was beautiful.
—Song of the hydroptic lens.
A fist knocks on the glass,
pastry crumbles in the air.