“Echolocation with Self and Body Parts,” by Leslie Contreras Schwartz (Poetry ’11)

2011 poetry graduate Leslie Contreras Schwartz was recently featured in Anomaly. Read an excerpt of “Echolocation with Self and Body Parts” below:

Echolocation with Self and Body Parts

It’s the eyes slit into walls, half open lids
that tricks. The lips beneath the eyes blue & frost-bitten. 
Corpse pose. But a crowbar jams against cut and quartered,

clicking tongues to find the jigsaw of other parts.
A foot in the door, a silent wrenching turning beneath the ground.
Nearing exhaustion, slit eyes with lids half closing. Half breathing.

Feeling for the one other body part, a hand, a rib, a foot, 
a labia at a time. Where are you, the inner thigh calls to vastus lateralis.
Furrows of corpse flower, quartered and twinned yet firm against cuts & crowbar.

A jaw’s gotten free and is having dinner with the dandelions. 
Behind the supper party, a knee and a femur knock on the door
with cracked walls, shutters half open. Let us back in.

Read the rest of this poem, as well as another, here: https://anmly.org/ap32/leslie-contreras-schwartz/