Barbara Schwartz’s poems have appeared in Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Quiddity, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Atticus Review, The 2River View, Josephine Quarterly, Nerve Lantern, and elsewhere. In 2006, she received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Currently, she is a poetry reader for Ep;phany Magazine, and serves as the director of education for Boys & Girls Harbor in New York City.
This Body’s for the Birds
Numbness,
blood’s blooming plumage,
knows nothing of the skin
it inhabits, boasts only
of its singular tyranny.
Pleasure, too, is as dumb
as a couple's molting wings
unhinged at the first
bruise of morning – So, what
of knowledge if the body relies upon
so many drunken couriers soaring
half-scrawled messages through
sacred corridors? To be
eviscerated thoughtlessly with so many thoughts
fluttering across the onyx
electric airways of the mind (o little
terror trapped inside –) is itself another
relentless thought caught
in the diaspora of being wholly
temporal, able to taste
touch, what is migratory and un-
knowable, ravishing
once.