CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Two Poems Betsy Andrews

HAND BOURNE Down your river of arm, a torrent. Blood, bone             muscle, skin, nerve, nail,                         tendon, marrow, cartilage, ligament, fate.                                    This is a cloudburst's sudden phalanx,             inches' sentiment and sweat. Upbody a wingbarb has licked at the spine.                         At 22 mph the bed load rolls grabs. With antediluvian turbulence                         we've inherited from the shrew, the hand makes a thousand gestures.                         This one unspools at the banks. Boat, half-moon, pyramid, pea, table, trapeze, grapple, gun.                                              Into the delta, then farther out,                                                                    landmarks disappear. 50 waves of tendon per second,                                   all the kings' men drowned.                         Though by the flood of the faithed to the Good Book          we're dykes and damned if we do, trillion gallons of water downriver          this morning corkscrew. The bulk of a body, I'll take it,                 little rubber tube of myself riding the beast of the flood. SKINNED                                                                                                 And there was a certain beggar                                                                                                 named Lazarus, which was laid at                                                                                                 the gate, full of sores...                                                                                                 Luke 16:20 climbed windward walls of the city checked myself into the skin-books a swelling a scab a shiny spot pothook    pool on this stretch of horn whirling you sprout    you sprout at my spine    sunder the covers drop foot     claw hand     mask face    rasp balls if I had them unbound     my coolest parts crackle in fire seeping through fallen leaves about touch self-inscribed big-wind-boil affliction deeper than flesh arranged in bundles like cigarettes in cellophane    see my silted blood run with wanting you     double platelet adhesiveness of the diseased armadillo     tattered barrel of bands snout-deep in hospital waste armored articulate berry juicing segments of self     a fist orange     and glove case of the bitter leather times there were we stood in the ground "dead unto"    handfuls of dust our lesions our lessons rotted weave of face the waste in troubled waters     soul a growling fish flayed flee from me as from a lion skin-built     filthy     sexed fruit     swinging my crown from thorns meat of my soles rotting holes eyebrow-fallen     punished and picked to petal in this vessel of skin     dog-tongued seacoasted    yellow-crossed     clapper-and-belled morning from the lazar house hear it:  you are forewarned love,    this is my pealing