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Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.

Airing

The idea was always
transfer: how to use
the body to eliminate

the body; at thirteen,
to experience bleeding
toes as pirouettes turning

to tornadoessucking in
and flaring out.

All that connects the dancer
to the pocked studio floor

is a block of wood concealed
within a pink satin skin.

Grands jetés across the room
to the score of the teacher’s stick,

each staccato _chaîné_spotted in the mirror,

eyes, head, flat plane
of the torso doubling;

numbers choreographed and counted
like an iron-clad pulse

so all steps beat as evenly
as blood through the heart.
Look.

You can see it happening,
the delicate gauze of sweat and heft

as each dancer strives
to skirt the angles
of the flesh, to strain herself

into the glitter
of sun through skylight.

And is this after all
these years,
the point? To lose

the matter of the self,
to move beyond

the body’s weights & levers,

those sensible mechanics
that keep us functioning?

Clearly we are flesh,
not air. Yet how we lean

toward that crossing,
the loss of body,

movement as movement
alone, voices now

becoming instruments,

words becoming
no more, no less, than breath:

watch as we expire._

Portrait of Christine Marshall

Christine Marshall’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry, AGNI Online, Beloit Poetry Journal, Calyx, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard Review, gutcult, Nimrod, and Western Humanities Review. She has been a finalist for The Nation‘s “Discovery” Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, and the Mahan Poetry Prize. She teaches at Davidson College. (updated 8/2012)

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