George Aird

HOLY BODY

I had thought it was something we understood, 
on Sundays where you lie back and read, legs pointed outwards like barbs,
and I brew the coffee which brings on headaches but that you’ll want to smell anyway. 
Or in how we assemble the day, thrown like our covers on the floor. 
There is the bread we forget to bake,
and gathering conkers beneath the horse chestnut in your garden.
They keep the spiders out, you told me, neatly
arranging the polished knuckles under the window, between photographs, 
on our bookshelves. These are the bodies that are all about our house. 
You accumulate them, cold and dormant like holy things.
I have lived about you and your ache of concentration for twelve months,
and sometimes I wonder at the world contained within ice drifts,
chemical islands breaking dangerously beneath the pale surface of your skin. 
And what if this energy one day erupts
out of the nerve endings where the painkillers can’t reach?
Surely, in this way, undiagnosed words are holy things, too? 
Cold. Ache. Drift. Fog. 
Which makes me a curious kind of follower, adherent to what I can’t see. 
Because, if this is not belief, then what?

George Aird is a writer based in the North West of England. He has previously been published in literary journals and magazines including Poetry Business’ The North Magazine, Under the Radar by Nine Arches Press, The Diversifly Anthology by Fair Acre Press, Ink, Sweat and Tears, and Eye Flash Poetry, among others. He is also currently a part of the Liverpool Everyman Playhouse’s Young Writers Group, and is working on his first full-length script, to be completed in 2019. Twitter: @G_aird.