from The Right Hand

Every pin is a tender path.
Every arrow begins to sew.
The skin, not the mind, creates the soul.

---

All the nerve passageways crowd
Into a finger’s whorl. 
A nexus: metropolitan.
A city in a palm.

---

Her hand moved slowly            tectonically across my trunk
The other hand beneath my back         was cradled      an asymptote
West-East, east-west            a lower    premonition
Breathe with this I told   myself              the wind
have done

---

​thus skin             is the portal
the laminate     the barrier
the reef against            the system
or  lesser   systematic   churn
What it may   conduct     I know
a harp             amid the tremors

---

And skin           is an organ
Aeolian             it bundles   strums
Vesuvian           it kindles
When pierced               it will   swarm

Christina Pugh has published five books of poems including Stardust Media (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and Perception (Four Way Books, 2017), named one of the top poetry books of 2017 by Chicago Review of Books. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and many other publications. A former Guggenheim fellow in poetry and Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, she is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

These poems are taken from a longer sequence titled The Right Hand, which was inspired by acupuncture, bodywork, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa in Ecstasy in Rome. The Right Hand was a recent finalist for the National Poetry Series.