Like the p’s in psoriasis and pneumonia, I was a silent child.
Like the exhausted Oklahoma topsoil, always under foot.
Like my smooth alabaster elbow, unnoticed till I came unhinged.
The unpronounced, the downtrodden, the ignored rise up eventually.
The p’s migrate to parched, pain, peril, and peace.
A scorched earth catches the wind.
A drought comes to a woman’s elbow.
“The surface of the earth crusted,” Steinbeck wrote, “a thin hard crust”;
and the soil cried out for rain.
Once your skin becomes your enemy, it is like the dust you will return to, storming up from your bones to bury your breath.
A small patch of foe skin spreads everywhere.
I scratched until I bled.
It felt good to bleed, to break through thirsty skin to the olecranon process, a half-moon of pain.
Forty years of scales and scabs, my dust bowl lasted.
John Updike went to war with his skin.
I yearned to molt, to be a snake, to flay myself.
The canvas I now inhabit is blank, healed.
At your beautifully set table, on heirloom white linen, I lean my polished elbows, a perfect W, not to be rude or ungrateful, not to take up more space than I deserve, but to ask why I have suffered so.
© 2001-2024 Fundación Dialnet · Todos los derechos reservados