THE STREWN BODY Poem by Luís Miguel Nava

His body was getting lost in the desert, which kept gaining more ground and redefining its borders inside him, causing his organs, isolated by the surrounding sands, to reverberate in a strange new way. Day by day he was getting more strewn out. The various parts of what could only abstractly be conceived as a whole were beginning to spread apart, such that the ocean tides were soon foaming between them, and the Milky Way itself started cutting through. His flesh, in fact, exerted an enigmatic attraction on the stars, which in due course it managed to assimilate, exhibiting them (to the unknowing) as so many luminous scars whose glow, transformed into blood, slowly dwindled. On these occasions he was no more than an ember among the ashes, though one could still make out the faint throbbing of his guts, apt to be quickened by the slightest change in the wind's direction. So he decided on a plastic-coated self. He began with his extremities, his fingers and feet, but soon he was meticulously wrapping his lungs, intestines and heart in cellophane, against which the waves made a frightful sound.