from Body/The Non-Body

This not knowing; this clutching; these hours
like a truck on bald treads; this pausing;
these hands; this languor; (this apple-rot; this
swell of grapes on the vine) this moving
slowly; this coming and going; this
stirring; (this wind-whipped cavalcade
of leaves) this pixilated humming; this body;
this reckoning; this coming; (this going) this
presence; (this deadfall quickened in frost)
this absence, this slow undwinding of light;
this stepping as if on ice; this tightening; (this
birdsong hushed by wind) this drawing in; (this
loosening) this letting or unletting of blood;
this welling; this trembling; this (letting) go




The body, shaken but not apterous, awake yet persistently sombulant, top-heavy, bloated to the gills, afflicted by night terrors, retching, a permanent case of the heebie-jeebies, afeared of everything—the trials by fire, by air, by water, its burgeoning cup size, thighs heretofore nalliparous, the old body, had but not held, shaken but not stirred, not ruined but ruminant…




Already happening, already there,
already refusing (the coffee, the wine,)
already as if underwater, as if trying
to walk underwater, already holding,
already no longer one, already
the swaddled animal of night
and already listening for its cry;
already without thinking,
without regret for the one
lone body, already trembling,
already carefully, already feeding
the still non-body; here’s
hoping, here’s waking with one
eye shut, already as if not
to break, fracture, otherwise
leak, already the first sky hunched
with snow, already the coming clear




And still the body alive and beating, despite having
gotten on in years, abiding the non-body which moves around
at night, not asleep but sombulant, and still the body, so weak sometimes
it can barely bring itself to chew, let alone wrench the caps off its many
jars of prepared foodstuffs, the body still has its old dream,
that is, to move to the sea and grow gradually
useless, the non-body quaked and fluttering, the body
done brought to its knees




Past happening, past here,
pas the old point of no
return, past hedging, past
hawing, past the old unletting (the
stirrups, the cramps) the future
cracked open in a vise, past
reason, past loneliness,
past the clock’s red eye
in the unwinding dawn, past
over, past remembrance,
past the hour of lead, the
wolf, reckoning




but why for the life of it the singing, why the lust-fed hands
like a pair of burning tongs, the table lacquered in moonlight,
why the moonlight, inky and desolate, why the lollygagging
in the snack aisle, the lying awake in the room beneath the all-night
fisticuffs of rain, why his hands, why getting felt up beside the bookcase,
why the polite verbiage of clouds, why if not for the life of it
the body, shaken but not apterous, not ruined but ruminant,
a dissonance, a fog, a humming…














Robyn Art grew up in Boston. She's the author of "The Stunt Double in Winter" available from Dusie Press. A text/visual collaboration with the artist Robin Barcus, entitled "Dear American Love Child, Yours, The Beautiful Undead" is forthcoming next winter from dancing girl press. Her recent work can be found in la petite zine, coconut, notellmotel, The Hat, and elsewhere. She lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn with her fourteen-month-old daughter, Titania Lee.






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