The window is always a body, and looked through.
The body is always a body, and carnage.
The fields are always threshing, and bodies.
Heart explains everything about body and not-body:
faint-hearted, heartsore, stout-hearted,
broken-hearted, half-hearted, good hearted.
Heart is always a window—
either rib-curtained, or rib-caged,
either cold-shouldered, or shouldering
through storm-grey-yellow-light evening,
mud and barbed wire and viscera,
a dune and salt-soft air and water-pulse.
See, I whisper, I pin myself to history. I see too much air,
or that this window opens onto a flock of hands,
all tear-thumbing or gun-gripping, and
the mind’s eye, all the wrists too stiff-necked
to pull curtains back or tear them down to see outside,
too mud-lived, too trenched.
I can’t get blood out of these stones
my ancestor-war, my lineage, my pounds of flesh,
my casements and shutters, my heaped bodies.
I have collected the still hearts of birds
for my sleeves. They have flown still dead through
my window. I have a chest pocket, a Bible for bullet-catching,
chest full of windows, glass-hearted payments:
an arm & a leg, fingers & thumbs, the foot in the door.
Body me, bother me. I open the window, fearful.
–
Devon Miller-Duggan has published poems in Rattle, Margie, The Antioch Review, Massachusetts Review, and Spillway. She teaches at the University of Delaware. Her books include Pinning the Bird to the Wall (Tres Chicas Books, 2008), Alphabet Year, (Wipf & Stock, 2017), and The Slow Salute (Lithic Press Chapbook Competition Winner, 2018).