If the Body is a Miracle
then so is the ball gag.
Vinyl siding. The small
trembling of the earth
as Oklahoma settles into
the new vacancies blasted
by fracking into the shale.
The weather and its ostentatious
flocculence and alternating layers
of mist and frost, has always felt miraculous,
but when we get it to pound Texas
flatter by a couple millimeters
with its thundering dozens of inches of rain
aren’t we also the miracle for teasing
the sky into a steam-hammer?
Praise the nipple
as much as the rubber tubing.
The needle-nose pliers as much
as the patient hand that shaped
the wing-like iliac crest.
The shrill discrete beeps
of the machines that draw
out of the body’s darkness
the murky pulsate doings of the body
and as much the beeps that tell us
the newborn is coding
as the ones that tell us
the newborn is stabilizing
in a sound as tremulous and sweet
as any dragged out of the rare
shadow-barred hold of a Stradivarius
whose Alpine spruce is supposed by experts
to be the reason for its sonority—
extra resonant due to its denseness
from growing through The Little Ice Age
which a bumper crop of trees brought on
by sucking extra carbon from the atmosphere,
able to reforest the plains of the Americas
because genocide had decimated
the half-agrarian native populations.
What a miracle, the word decimated,
the words population and genocide—
stainless, almost, and smooth
like the lucent synthetic fibers
archeologists use to brush off the femurs
of history
the little crumbs
of ruptured spleens and broken teeth
and bashed-in skulls and smoldering hair
so we can see instead this potsherd
and consider the craftsperson
instead of the fact it was shattered.
ξ
"If the Body is a Miracle" first appeared in New England Review.
Conor Bracken is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press), as well as the translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center) and Jean D’Amérique’s forthcoming No Way in the Skin without this Bloody Embrace (Ugly Duckling Presse). His work has earned support from Bread Loaf, the Community of Writers, the Frost Place, Inprint, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and has appeared in places like BOMB, jubilat, New England Review, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares, among others. His first book of poems, The Enemy of My Enemy is Me, is out now with Diode Editions.
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