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Reconstruction
CHEST
Pectoriloquy
Editor’s Note: “There is a lot in literature linking the space of the body with external space, and it intrigued me to explore this by creating small details as well as large ones.” Andy Hughes is a graduate student in Massachusetts. He dedicates this poem to Dr. Frank Ganzhorn.
Reconstruction The veins are brave canals that carry dogs and sacks of garbage crooked under rain away to somber provinces of flesh and nerve still silent. The heart is a long forgotten city still producing chairs, or leather shoes just like it always has because it was the capital one time, and ragged hands do only what they know in darkness, after smokestacks and expansion to the crowded boroughs: stomach, chest, the thighs, the arms, the clouds around the face that give it shape. They palpitate and churn with residents unsure and left alone but somehow all the lights are still switched on, the heat is running, phone lines are cut down but messages are sent. The bodyⲐcountry screams and hears itself, sends messengers down ancient cobbled streets of burns, snapped bones, and arteries like cul-de-sacs, to jot down notes and take its census. Then the ones up north, the high, electric ones decide that reconstruction must begin
and so the movement starts awakening lost cells, and limbs are twitching. There are signs: reports from outer space of white and black, temperature, pain. But now the smoke is cleared, the rivers cleaned, the dogs revived the country of the body starts to wake: The grasses in the heart are slow and green, the lungs are treetops stirring with the wind, lips twitch, the organisms of the eyes swim fast again, the teeth and lips are opening and readying for speech and finally the landscape is prepared for its surrounding world to be revealed. The men and women, cattle, fish and birds of this abandoned place of sentient play now feel their country open up its mouth: and scream again, because the body feels the air, it sees the walls and knows it is alone. Andy Hughes, BA Groton, MA
Editor’s note for authors of submissions to Pectoriloquy: Poems should not exceed 350 words, should not have been previously published, and should be related to concerns of physicians and medicine. First submissions to the Pectoriloquy Section should be submitted via e-mail to [email protected]. Authors of accepted poems will be asked to submit the final version to CHEST Manuscript Central. —Michael Zack, MD, FCCP © 2011 American College of Chest Physicians. Reproduction of this article is prohibited without written permission from the American College of Chest Physicians (http://www.chestpubs.org/site/misc/reprints.xhtml). DOI: 10.1378/chest.10-0896 www.chestpubs.org
CHEST / 139 / 5 / MAY, 2011
Downloaded from chestjournal.chestpubs.org by Kimberly Henricks on May 5, 2011 © 2011 American College of Chest Physicians
1245
Pectoriloquy
Editor’s Note: “There is a lot in literature linking the space of the body with external space, and it intrigued me to explore this by creating small details as well as large ones.” Andy Hughes is a graduate student in Massachusetts. He dedicates this poem to Dr. Frank Ganzhorn.
Reconstruction The veins are brave canals that carry dogs and sacks of garbage crooked under rain away to somber provinces of flesh and nerve still silent. The heart is a long forgotten city still producing chairs, or leather shoes just like it always has because it was the capital one time, and ragged hands do only what they know in darkness, after smokestacks and expansion to the crowded boroughs: stomach, chest, the thighs, the arms, the clouds around the face that give it shape. They palpitate and churn with residents unsure and left alone but somehow all the lights are still switched on, the heat is running, phone lines are cut down but messages are sent. The bodyⲐcountry screams and hears itself, sends messengers down ancient cobbled streets of burns, snapped bones, and arteries like cul-de-sacs, to jot down notes and take its census. Then the ones up north, the high, electric ones decide that reconstruction must begin
and so the movement starts awakening lost cells, and limbs are twitching. There are signs: reports from outer space of white and black, temperature, pain. But now the smoke is cleared, the rivers cleaned, the dogs revived the country of the body starts to wake: The grasses in the heart are slow and green, the lungs are treetops stirring with the wind, lips twitch, the organisms of the eyes swim fast again, the teeth and lips are opening and readying for speech and finally the landscape is prepared for its surrounding world to be revealed. The men and women, cattle, fish and birds of this abandoned place of sentient play now feel their country open up its mouth: and scream again, because the body feels the air, it sees the walls and knows it is alone. Andy Hughes, BA Groton, MA
Editor’s note for authors of submissions to Pectoriloquy: Poems should not exceed 350 words, should not have been previously published, and should be related to concerns of physicians and medicine. First submissions to the Pectoriloquy Section should be submitted via e-mail to [email protected]. Authors of accepted poems will be asked to submit the final version to CHEST Manuscript Central. —Michael Zack, MD, FCCP © 2011 American College of Chest Physicians. Reproduction of this article is prohibited without written permission from the American College of Chest Physicians (http://www.chestpubs.org/site/misc/reprints.xhtml). DOI: 10.1378/chest.10-0896 www.chestpubs.org
CHEST / 139 / 5 / MAY, 2011
Downloaded from chestjournal.chestpubs.org by Kimberly Henricks on May 5, 2011 © 2011 American College of Chest Physicians
1245