For starters, don’t call it a cage
corralling the breath. Savvy fingertips
mutely Braille two-dozen ribs,
each commandeering its own space
24–7, salaaming or shifting,
then rising.
And re-envision those lungs
as maps, the self’s inner atlas:
one hundred routes
funneling
into branch lines,
cloverleafs,
cul de sacs.
Or call them dual panniers
flanking a breastbone,
one plump koi, kissing a mirror,
all lips and flared silk.
Wild as papyrus,
a Psalter. A Rorschach. A centerfold.
Newly un-boned as a cat,
inhabit that next inhale, feeling
how spacious a backbone can be,
freeing shoulders to roll,
the head to loll
and lift, floating into place, the body
aligned, alight, a home for the holy.
About Laurie Klein
Laurie Klein's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ascent, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, The Southern Review, Terrain, and other journals. A winner of the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred, her chapbook, Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh, won the Predator Press award. Klein's debut collection, Where the Sky Opens, A Partial Cosmography, is forthcoming from Cascade Books as part of The Poeima Poetry Series.
