Ellen McGrath Smith
Camel Pose (Ustasana)
I felt like a hood ornament,
nude
like that; there
must have been a glare
I doubt they would have
seen as beautiful.
Knees planted for
the twenty-minute
pose, my hands
like wrenches on
my heels, my head an
afterthought and hair
a vine that sought
the ground behind me,
I heard each scratch
of every pencil, saw
the clockface upside-
down. In camel,
blood drained
through the C-curve
of my neck to my
skull, steeping all my fears
till they dissolved
because now I was nothing
but a body—good or bad—
and it was something
they could draw—
it had mass; it was not
filthy. Blemished, but
the charcoal arcs in pebbly
rasps could trace it. As
gravity revised
my face, I drew in
breath from below &
above me, breaths
that grazed my tailbone,
which was still
in place, while all my back
departed for another kind of stack
in which each disk was re-
acquainted but with
distance (like
the spill of a suspension
bridge, or old love brought to new).
The camel and my body—
white and factual
inside the bright—
could never be alike but
in diaphanous
intensity as lights
and sun bear down and in the
spine a strange
endurance stores itself.
When I had lost
all feeling and become
abstract, the timer shrieked, I lurched
toward that mirage—
my body standing
on two legs.
Sirasana: Martinis
Bio
Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the Carlow University Madwomen in the Attic program. Her writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, Quiddity, Cimarron, and other journals, and in several anthologies, including Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Smith has been the recipient of an Orlando Prize, an Academy of American Poets award, a Rainmaker Award from Zone 3 magazine, and a 2007 Individual Artist grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her second chapbook, Scatter, Feed, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in the fall of 2014, and her book, Nobody's Jackknife, will be published this fall by the West End Press.