Spotlight on Prime Number Magazine
The latest issue of Prime Number Magazine just came out, and it’s full of great poems, short stories, craft essays, and much more! Below, find a poem by Aviva Englander Cristy, and find one other poem by her (and plenty more poetry!) here.
The Simple Fact of Waking
In dark I start with the muscle stretched beneath your jaw. Should I be technical? The sternomastoid gently reaching down to the pit of your neck. It is a new beginning. Here is the bone we know as the elegance of form. God’s grace hanging the body from a single line, your structure breaking forth. With one touch I can pull apart linea alba, breaking the skin open between suprasternal notch and groin. I am trying to see the bones from underneath, looking for the moment when they emerge from flesh to touch the skin themselves. I will always use the clavicle as my referent, pulling it out with the tips of my fingers when I find the corner of your frame. Then will your body collapse? The skin folding away without its binding, muscle exposing itself, disengaged, ready to be lifted out. Your body becomes the simple fact of form, each bone recognized for what it holds in. I know the ribcage is the sonnet of the soul, the coda folded between hipbones. Here dawn is the moment of the limbs. I cannot see the ulna beneath your flesh, only its quiet intransigence just before the turn of your wrist.
