The successive houses Either demolished or burned
in which we have lived museums of baby teeth, photos,
have no doubt made memories of dwellings
our gestures commonplace now dust circling the globe
When we return to What we breathe into
the old house after the blood, we exhale
an odyssey of many years on the other side of the globe
the earliest gestures come as a film of ash
alive… The word a past that inhabits another’s
habit is too worn present tense, inhaled
a word for the detritus of a life
passionate liaison of crisscrosses the earth
our bodies which do not forget molecules, ether
an unforgettable house of coded flesh
—Christine Swint
Christine Swint’s poems have appeared in Calyx, Birmingham Poetry Review, Slant, a Journal of Poetry, Tampa Review, Heron Tree and others. Her first poetry collection, Swimming This, was published in 2015 by FutureCycle Press. She lives in metro Atlanta, Georgia with her family and their dogs, Red and Duffy. She teaches first-year composition at a local university and writes about poetry, art, hiking and yoga at Balanced on the Edge, http://christineswint.com. Christine writes “[‘Dependent Co-arising’] is written in two columns, with one of the columns including words borrowed from The Poetics of Space. All words borrowed from Bachelard appear in italics.”
Copyright 2017, Christine Swint.