by Ellen McGrath Smith
When art walked into the room, the legs of the chairs went zook
and we fell on our asses, but our asses were cushioned by fat,
so we cried, laughed and told each other stories of childhood
misunderstandings of the way the world worked.
Or it was science who walked in, face like an astrolabe, thick
through the ankles and wrists. The room fell silent, all of us
chastened baskets of symptoms. This room extended from desk
to mousepad but only felt crowded in election years or wars.
We were prisoners but we had no idea. Religion came to visit
alternate weekends, like a father who toured with his band but
needed to chill with his spawn to get grounded. We had extra-
special food or a fast, we never knew what it was going to be.
Bones of our ancestors turned into drumsticks and our pulses
went public. Days of this, nights when our skin blew loosely
like curtains in spring and the moon kept placid watch—
then it was gone again, and we were merely naked. Panicking,
some of us cried out to art, some invoked science. Others
made their legs into pretzels and rode with the hum of their blood
and the kisses and pinches of perception. Artists circled these,
drew their shapes from every angle: peace eluded even
the most eloquent strokes, and poems could only drip words
in futile imitation, but every exhalation dried them up
to pollen. Science scanned their brains and saw bright colors
where before was fuzzy gray. There was no chisel or scalpel.
There was no progress, regression or egress. Science, religion, and art
went outside, where smoke-thin parachutes dropped from trees
by the thousands, though only a few would be trees in the future.
Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Her poetry has appeared in The Georgia Review, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Talking Writing, Los Angeles Review, and other journals and anthologies. Books include Scatter, Feed (Seven Kitchens 2014) and Nobody's Jackknife (West End Press 2015). Her chapbook Lie Low, Goaded Lamb was published in January 2023 by Seven Kitchens Press as part of its Keystone Series.