"The Chairs That No One Sits In" by Billy Collins

You see them on porches and on lawns 

down by the lakeside, 

usually arranged in pairs implying a couple 

who might sit there and look out 

at the water or the big shade trees. 

The trouble is you never see anyone 

sitting in these forlorn chairs 

though at one time it must have seemed   

a good place to stop and do nothing for a while. 

Sometimes there is a little table 

between the chairs where no one   

is resting a glass or placing a book facedown. 

It might be none of my business, 

but it might be a good idea one day 

for everyone who placed those vacant chairs 

on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them 

for the sake of remembering 

whatever it was they thought deserved 

to be viewed from two chairs   

side by side with a table in between. 

The clouds are high and massive that day. 

The woman looks up from her book. 

The man takes a sip of his drink. 

Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking, 

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird 

then another, cries of joy or warning— 

it passes the time to wonder which.

"The New Religion" by Chris Abani

The body is a nation I have not known.

The pure joy of air: the moment between leaping

from a cliff into the wall of blue below. Like that.

Or to feel the rub of tired lungs against skin-

covered bone, like a hand against the rough of bark.

Like that. “The body is a savage,” I said.

For years I said that: the body is a savage.

As if this safety of the mind were virtue

not cowardice. For years I have snubbed

the dark rub of it, said, “I am better, Lord,

I am better,” but sometimes, in an unguarded

moment of sun, I remember the cowdung-scent

of my childhood skin thick with dirt and sweat

and the screaming grass.

But this distance I keep is not divine,

for what was Christ if not God’s desire

to smell his own armpit? And when I

see him, I know he will smile,

fingers glued to his nose, and say, “Next time

I will send you a down as a dog

to taste this pure hunger.”