Revision by Amanda Leahy

I.

To have a body: this also means

to be a subject of violence.

II.

I can tell you there is a war going on but I cannot tell you where or how or for how long or why. I can tell you there are people dying. I can tell you they are using everything they can against us: water and light and sound, words and names and syntax and design, plants and animals and children and plastics, chemical compounds and mothers and heavy and simple machinery, night and desire and hunger and the absence of hunger, death and radiation and faceless inhuman interaction and the impossibility of beauty for us, and more.

All of if they are using against your body, and against mine.

III.

And when, from within the dark, I return to you

And when I say I love you

And when I wrap my being around you

the force of everything that is my body:

triumphant,

merciless.

I want to say, instead:

this also means to be a subject of violence:

to have a body, in love.

___________________

Amanda Leahy is a native of Lowell, Massachusetts.She is currently an MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in Montpelier, Vermont.H er work has appeared in Thin Air, Crack the Spine, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere