Corporal Works

Lynn Domina

Winner of The Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry
selected by Stephen Dobyns

 

FEEDING THE HUNGRY,

GIVING DRINK TO THOSE WHO THIRST

 

…I need not feel grief, I can eat grief…

–Sara Suleri, Meatless Days

 

The table is prepared:

the burgundy as robust as blood

coursing through a torso, the crusty bread

uncut and hot, the honey, the butter.

 

In this gust of time, our lives

seem nearly perfect.

Against the butter knife, the bread board, our touch

is brief and premediated. Honey floats on my tongue,

a last still point of assurance

before our cascade of grief.

 

My body hazy with wine, I lean back

into my misbelief that life is

everlasting. We receive the night as a third body

arrived to eat and drink. We’ve forgotten

how bodies transfuse themselves

into night, first an ordinary

flake of skin, an unmissed eylash,

then an entire birthmark or scar

twisted among the roots

of a field, soaked up into a tassel of wheat,

kneaded into a loaf

which multiplies as we leave ourselves

at this irresistible edge of hunger,

this brink of thirst.