the insistence of a body (after Schiele), by Yanis Iqbal

the insistence of a body (after Schiele)
​
she is reclined, yes,
but not in the passive graveyard of comfort  
she leans like a blade, like a hemorrhaging hug
in the windless house of flesh 
an angle sharper than elegy, duller than forgetting.

her fingers, 
gnarled starfish of invocation
reach upwards, or downwards, or nowhere at all,
their prayer is not to god but to gesture itself,
that ancient crackle in the wrist’s thorny theatre.

how violently calm she lies,
how her coat folds like arrested smoke
and her spine blooms into a horizontal icicle 
a spine not of support, but of protest,
of the languor that refuses to end,
but stretches, sentence-shivering, into some unpronounceable mush.

the outline is stitched with hunger
not for food, no
but for the disaster of being perceived.
each line an autopsy of attention,
a scalpel’s dream of precision melting
in the soft apocalypse of skin.

a sliver of jawline dares the page to fold
elbow a hound’s snarl wrapped in linen geometry,
shoulder cinched into a mute theorem of black-crease,
not explaining, never yielding, only bristling
into its own bruised longitude

there: the cheekbone, a jut of mistranslation,
clenched against the fade of mirrors,
tilted like vowels abandoned mid-prayer
no glossary, only the stutter of skin-in-light.

beneath the wrist: a garden of bone-rhythm,
each tendon a child’s forgotten stick
scratching itself into the flesh-ground

her knee, not bent but snarled,
a topography of unfinished ironies, 
invented to confuse furniture and god.

the throat, neither vessel nor passage,
but a stamp of self-absorbed uncertainty,
where breath halts to measure its own weight
against the velocity of not-speaking.

oh, and the colour
a sepia soaked in silence,
bloodless, yet not pale
like the breath of parchment
just before it screams.

no signal gathers in the hush of her elbow
just a long sob of linen folding into angles,
creases like imploded stars trapped in the geometry of gesture.

Her hip juts like a sigh half-erased,
not wrong, just smudged by the grease of breath
and beneath, the fabric
rises not as modesty
but as immobile sharpness:
a slow-lit wick of gesture unfurling sideways,
into lawlessness 

skin flickers in octagonal hushes,
the elbow knotted like smoked wire,
hand halved with verbs uncoiled
revolt of accumulation,
bedsheets of pauses
dragging their dress through the spinal dusk.

she leaks
yes, she leaks
spilling fibrous time from the soft-walled cathedral
of her paused breath
every fold a refusal
every knuckle an unclocked anomaly
​
not once, but relentlessly,
she twists
not forward,
but in
inward like bone folding back into root,
like cloth learning to forget its thread.

Yanis Iqbal

Yanis Iqbal is studying at Aligarh Muslim University, India. He is the author of Education in the Age of Neoliberal Dystopia and has a forthcoming book on Palestine and anti-colonial political theory with Iskra Books. His poetry has appeared in Cafe Dissensus, Radical Art Review, Culture Matters, and elsewhere.