body poems

by Abish Qamar

I.  The Apparition of Birth

There is a body that was never there.

It sits and recurs in blots, in tinctures, in bruise toned ghouls,

in possibilities of occurrences ploughing through planes so fraudulent,

in stretch wide across the horizons cinched beneath

the skin to the layered fat of the vessels and the scants,

to the ridges of the flesh to the ligaments on the bones to the marrow within.

All clad on the threshold of unbecoming,

condensed to a morsel, parched and taxidermied.

II.  The Trial of Flesh

The body jitters in horrendous arbitration of wounds,

about the lowly, self inflicted miser.

The vision broils, tendon upon tendon, in frets for the devoid.

And it warps dimensions like blood bound beasts,

singing in circles curated to serve their own undoing.

Where the inescapable clothes within capability, billows

in the brewed corpses of own futility.

And a protector wails in the garb of its own fail.

III.  The Quietus of Decay

The body remains a loose creature of dissolution,

a fishhook slackened within the dirty banks of its wreck and flaw.

And the prodigious is now a starving hound,

thin-ribbed, gleaming in the spit of its maw.

Its insatiability in haste about the writhe in its unabating mouth.

And the agony fools no more,

the salivating organ in ribs, the slick-wet

fruit curled within, needs to palpitate no more.

Photo of Abish Qamar

BIO: Abish Qamar is from Pakistan, currently an undergraduate student at Middle East Technical University, where she studies by daylight and writes in the stolen minutes and sleepless margins of it. Reading and writing have been her flesh and marrow for as far as her memory stretches. And when she's not bound by either, you’ll find her gathering rocks from the odd edges of the road.