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Malak Mattar, Untitled (detail), 2024, charcoal on paper

The Shape of Things

Where a shrine lies buried
below the body’s surface—every act of love
reaches toward the subterranean
lay-line. Even kids playing bloody knuckles
on the school bus, a radical attempt at breaking
into the humming garden where all seasons
drape like silk over the shape of things.
Just as the spine of a lover leaving
carries the declination of a loyalty
to the joints, tendons, disks, places where
we swivel, turning toward the next moment
like a field of sunflowers rising, necks stretched,
our faces seeds, opening.

Published: | Online 2005

Stephanie N. Johnson

Stephanie N. Johnson, born in Minnesota, has lived in Alaska and Thailand. Her poems and essays have appeared in Dislocate, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her second collection of poems, Kinesthesia, forthcoming from New Rivers Press in the fall of 2010, and a memoir about hunting and aviation. (2005)

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