Soldier

by Michelle Lewis

Your lost arm calls to the shoulder as a horse
head cries to its carcass.

But another feels his leg a tumor — one no doctor will exhume
so he tries himself over & over to cut to the truth it is telling.

How do you carry your sex, the mermaid sings,
outside of the body,
how cope you your parted
peninsulas?  To the fish any space is a wound.

New calf in your self-made cradle,
goat hung by your legs.

tell of the body’s wreckage —

steepleless church the dead’s fingers
make, legs that make a gentle spear.  Make you my boy back
who’d take my fingers in his
to shift us his
car into second, third, fourth, to soar us some road to nowhere.

Hands our whole body then, sky open its arms to our arms.