- Afternoon, Córdoba
Not the body as a clock or wheel or hydraulic rush or cocked gun but how much the body can do without the mind: the salty joint and bone and blood, the want and lean toward lime-scented shave and pomade in still-wet hair, the body gliding toward every muscle and falling from all learned things for one taste of the fine row of hairs along the abdomen and limbs pulsing with light. It seems so easy for the mind to vanish in a narrow switch that begins its journey in the hot slip of afternoon but the switch never ends: it is a hovering, an incompletion as the mind returns to its ghost.
Joanne Diaz received her MFA from New York University, where she was a New York Times Foundation Fellow. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Quarterly West and the Southern Review.