My skin was pulled taut to cover, and my feet were staked to the ground, and once they were gone, they still came back to me for shelter, until they were grown, close to full-size, and then I folded up those sections, flaps that were my skin, pulled up stakes, and they became feet again.
If the table’s edge were not there, she would have caught herself with her hands, and I could have picked her up and kissed her sore palms. If her foot hadn’t twisted and turned her body as she looked the other way, she would have walked over to her brother and joined him playing. If …
They keep working, folding into palm, reaching out, free for moments at a time; while you cannot speak with your mouth, they grasp the hand that is offered; they remember how to move to a song you’ve forgotten, how to touch and hold and let go. They are your last extension, the furthest reach you …
runs from the middle of my head, splits into different paths on my forehead where so much of the work of piecing together occurred. I was a grown woman with both my parents around me as if I was a child again as the doctor worked post-car crash sewing and knotting and picking out turf …
Shelter is the warm night on the deck of a boat that has sickened me with sea swells all day, that has settled late to let me sleep along with the others: kicked aside shoes, thick coils of rope, the stars, the moon, the steady call of water, the shape of my lover after he …
Very quickly there is the sensation of nothing underfoot, and the realization begins, and then there is the fear that floods the body as quick as rain in the river drives past the river’s banks: trunk and limbs can hardly contain it, until the sudden meeting, less than a minute later, of arm, back, butt, …
Into the windblown oats, a pattern is only there because two boys are walking in there; they are small green figures in the silver topped grasses, looking to find their way further afield. Bent at the ground, those damaged patches are what they skirt; they are not fast like the fox or aware as the …
Reaching into the bush, separating healthy branch from what is overgrown, holding steady what the other hand, with saw, will cut. The sky is blue, leaves are pale green in the drenched spring sun and that one hand holding the saw belongs to the world—firmly gripping what is useful for its work— and the other …