We speak of a person as a body—

Emma Aylor

1 Minute Read Time

This blurry photograph shows a woman in a black tanktop. — Photo by Finn Mund on Unsplash

in the South, a body might do that, or
it makes a body feel some type of way.
Here rounding at the knees to support

the body as it carries my keepings
up the hill; wrists in coats as a body
walks around the city; picked a hair

from my shoulder, but it wasn’t my hair.
A body can confide. Fortune carries
sometimes in the body like a coin kept

in the stomach: when you pull a tooth
from a body, drive it in an apple tree
for good luck. It is bad luck for a body

to find an open safety pin; good
to find a button—if
a body keeps it. Don’t mend

a garment while it’s worn. A body
looms like a tree dressed in winter
kudzu: stems ashbrown bodies

as the leaves die back in the cold,
stems trailing where in summer
they’d grown as much as a foot in a day:

stems like hair from a ghost body.
Kudzu can grow on a body.
When the rain is far off

over them, the jagged Cascades
round like the backs
of bodies in prayer. It’s bad luck

to watch a body out of sight.

Emma Aylor

is the author of Close Red Water (2023), winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, and elsewhere, and she has been awarded artist residencies at the Montello Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Petrified Forest National Park. Aylor holds a PhD from Texas Tech University, an MFA from the University of Washington, and a BA from William & Mary. She is an assistant professor at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, where she teaches poetry in the BFA and MA programs.

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