Jeremy Luke Hill
$6
The Body as Home and Worldpublished in Ottawa by above/ground press
Many traditional cultures have understood the body, the home, and the world to be figures for one another, where, for example, the ribs of the chest mean the beams of the house mean the arch of the sky.
We are ever more precisely mapped
but no longer know the meaning of where
we are. The body is no more a home,
the home no more a world. I have papered
the walls of my room with pictures of sons,
covers of books, posters of festivals,
the ephemera of a life. When children
come into custody, they bring nothing
with them but their hurt. This is called making
a break with the past. We must be put back
in our place, made to know it like a nest,
a burrow, a lea stone, a placenta,
an eggshell. Our dining room table
belonged to my wife's parents. They bought it
when just married, to hold them until
they could afford better, but it has served
four generations now through fifty years.
Children of neglect must often be taught
how to eat at a table, how to manipulate
cutlery, how to believe there will still
be food tomorrow. Home must always be
relearned. I have planted our gardens
with flowers stolen from the places where
our children were loved—jack-in-the-pulpits,
lady slippers, peonies—a landscape
irreconcilable with digital maps,
with satellite GPS, with sequenced DNA,
where our ribs hold space like arches of sky,
where the beams of the house grow within us.
October 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Jeremy Luke Hill is the publisher at Gordon Hill Press and The Porcupine's Quill, small press literary publishers based in Guelph, Ontario. He has written several books, chapbooks, and broadsheets, most recently Microchimaera (Baseline Press, 2024). His writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, including The Antigonish Review, ARC Poetry, CNQ, CV2, EVENT Magazine, filling Station, Free Fall, The Goose, HA&L, The Maynard, and The Puritan.
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