Sitting in the harsh light of the mirror,tracing the map of my body,I wonder about solitude—having only body parts for company.Anatomy is a story told in parts:the philtrum’s groove,The lunula’s sliver of sky on a nail,the glabella’s smooth plainbetween the brows’ dark weather.A wind brushes the pinna,tears gather in the canthus of the eye.The body, a silent ferry, slows its engines.I never knew the heart could be foundin the hollow of an axilla,or that a wish could lodgein the uvula’s pendulum swing.We are a collection of forgotten body parts.The purlicue’s potential for holding another’s hand.The columella’s quiet vigil beneath the nose.And the tragus listening at the door to the dark.The hallux pointing the way forward, alone.The zygoma’s arch, the gnathion’s blunt end,the nasion’s deep root all holda breath not yet taken, a scaffolding of sighs.And at the center, the sternum’s shield,behind which something beatsa frantic, nameless rhythm.It’s been a toss-up betweenloving this vessel of skin and bone,this cartography of strange, beautiful names,and feeling a stranger inside it.As long as I’m alive,I am both the glabella’s worryand the philtrum’s grace,the hallux grounded,the uvula adrift, unknown, perhaps,but held by the simple fact of a name,
Poetry·Vol. XIV · Issue 3 · August 2026
Fourteen Body Parts You Didn’t Know Had Names
Photograph by Engin Akyurt, via Unsplash.
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About the writer
Vinita Agrawal. Vinita Agrawal lives in Indore, India. She has authored six books of poetry and edited two anthologies on climate change. She is the recipient of the Jayanta Mahapatra National Award for Literature 2024, the Proverse Prize Hongkong 2021, the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence, USA, 2015. She co-edits the Yearbook series of Indian Poetry in English. She was former Poetry Editor with Usawa Literary Review. She has been published in Global South, Pratik, Mascara Review, Indian Literature, Asian Cha, Voice and Verse, The Bombay Literary Magazine and the Knopf Newsletter among others. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize.
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