Mantis 18 (Spring 2020)
The Embodied Mind

Chris Holdaway


None most of all

When the cosmic speaks my skin separates

The world from the deep

Wears my brainwaves away to the races

My skin of meadowflowers

The dirt increasingly blue like oxidised copper

Frozen medicine in the civil war of geology

All-embracing language to forget

The familiar political fog of my own face

The power of machine noise to really annoy me

Heavy rain casting death masks

Outworked by virtually all industry

Perfumed wind—

Plays my open neck

Like a glass bottle with technical spirit.


CHRIS HOLDAWAY is a poet and bookmaker from Aotearoa/ New Zealand. He is the author of HIGH-TENSION/FASHION (Greying Ghost, 2018), and directs Compound Press.