After a conversation overheard at the Bagram Air Base DFAC
But which book: War and Peace
or To The Lighthouse
Mystery, potboiler, post-feminist
historical fiction, books dense with text
or filled with florid sentences flowing
across the dome of muscle and tendon
thinly separating chest from abdomen
Autobiography of respiration inspirational
memoir, philosophies of the western
world that expand and contract
in the marketplace of rib and sternum
Joseph Campbell’s heroes peering
from the thoracic cavity
Emily Dickinson’s feathers
rising and falling as the body falters
Walt Whitman’s boots yawp
at the edge of the esophagus
The body’s pages open to reader
to surgeon to soldier, its chapters
breaking – with each breath
a sounding that bellows up from
lumbar like a white whale
sailing across oceans of lung
Wave after wave of watery
exhalations that scroll
as the diaphragm is lifted
The body’s book written
in phrenic nerves in aorta
Its table of contents set
at first breath and last
Your story my story
marching from page to page
Pamela Hart is writer in residence at the Katonah Museum of Art. A 2013 NEA poetry fellow, she is completing a manuscript, Penelope at the Shooting Range. She’s a mentor for the Afghan Women’s Writing Project. Her chapbook from Toadlily Press is The End of the Body. Her poetry has been published in a variety of journals.