Poem of the Week: Sheila Black

                   

        

   

Rosary for my Brace       

The brace was metal, and it fastened around the ankles.

Outside in the street there was the beggar with elephantiasis; there was

the leper, the neighbor with eyes milky blind,

and in the book the child with the hand reaching out for the water.

Everyone spoke in code, everyone lied. There were the

invisible hospitals. There were the poor who could be scattered

like lice. There were the lanterns made of tin cans, which transformed

a light to lace. There was the sharp knife for the mangoes,

the machete for the coconut. Coffee trees grew in the garden,

red blood flesh with the hard bean underneath, green-tighter,

bitter, and the smell of the almond trees, and the carp

that swam under the fountains. There was Flora with the scar

bisecting her face, and the wide stitches along it

like a child would make. And the bottle of white liquor that

burned. And the doctor who smelled of tobacco. And the

boots with iron bars along the bottom. The leather boots that

smelled of sweat. And there was the doll that was like a

pretty girl. Golden hair, stiff limbs, and bird-button eyes.

And there was the world of the night and the moon and the

dog star. And the smell of jasmine and a frozen dust. A bicycle

riding along a moonlit track. Going nowhere, going to

the ocean. The beach where Einstein proved the Theory of

Relativity. Which meant there were many rooms and many

angles. Which meant that the clock, too, lied. That I could be here

and there at the same time. Except I couldn't, except I kept

falling. Back under the mosquito net. Back inside the moon tiger

And the house ticking, ticking. And the wire corset and the

steel brace whose function was to correct and straighten.

 

-Sheila Black

 

Used by permission.    

Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone and Love/Iraq (both CW Press). She recently co-edited with poets Jennifer Bartlett and Mike Northen Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press). A third collection Wen Kroy is forthcoming from Dream Horse Press where it received the 2011 Orphic Prize in Poetry. She is a 2012 Witter Bynner Fellow in Poetry, selected by Philip Levine.

   

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