Slow Comfort Consuming the Body

(Inspired by Michael Timpson's Exhibit "But the Ball is Lost and the Mallet Slipped,"
North Carolina Museum of Art, Nov. 2, 1991-February 2, 1992


Bike handles wrapped in white bandages:
four white crucifixes arranged in a Latin cruciform,
and from them the sinew of brake wires stretch,
hanging. The cross is a slow vehicle,
molasses a slow blood;
forks and spoons to consume the body
are sprinkled beneath the vat;
four buckets hang above,
spread incense, or catch manna.

Will it speed the masses?
A serene white cotton cloth
covers shards of glass,
spreads softly on the floor

Steven B. Katz is Associate Professor of English at North Carolina State University, where he teaches rhetoric and poetics. He has published poems in Pembroke Magazine, Postmodern Culture, Continental Drift, the American Medical Association's Archives of Family Medicine, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, European Judaism (London), Obsidian: Black Literature in Review, Southern Poetry Review, Northeast Journal, The Greenfield Review, Outpost, and other journals. He lives with his wife and son in Raleigh.

 
Copyright © 2003 by Steven B. Katz all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. Copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.