A special commission looked into
my lungs, crystal chandelier
of swifts, a city, like Lwow, built
around a leaven, ornate organ,
pronounced me sound for study,
body ready as the school’s
for cultivation: conservatory:
greenhouse with breath music starting.
Both were occupied, but my lungs only
pretended to the commons, encompassed
a lovely absence, a space
of thinking over space.
Professor S., famous baritone, deepened one.
Widely-admired, whiskered, one of us,
he threatened to leave when they forbade
my return (Father’s business known)
and sang an acrid aria at the assembly.
The fourteen chambers of my glass house opened
and the bears let me walk around
in my own body, testing its resonance.
He saw in me someone where I saw only
wind. He would teach me to control it.
Amaranth Borsuk is the author of Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012), selected by Paul Hoover for the 2011 Slope Editions Book Prize, and, with programmer Brad Bouse, of Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012), an augmented reality book of poems. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in CutBank, SPECS, Harp & Altar, The Offending Adam, and The Destroyer. Abra, a book of conjoined poems written with Kate Durbin and illustrated by Zach Kleyn, is forthcoming from ZG Press.She has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at MIT, where she works and teaches at the intersection of print and digital media.
