What You Mourn

The year they straightened my legs,

the young doctor said, meaning to be kind,

Now you will walk straight

on your wedding day, but what he could not

imagine is how even on my wedding day

I would arch my back and wonder

about the body I had before I was changed,

how I would have nested in it.

made it my home, how I repeated his words

when I wished to stir up my native anger,

feel like the exile I believed

I was, imprisoned in a foreign body

like a person imprisoned in a foreign land,

forced to speak a strange tongue,

heavy in the mouth, a mouth full of stones.

Crippled they called us when I was young,

later the word was disabled and then differently abled,

but those were all names given by outsiders,

none of whom could imagine

that the crooked body they spoke of,

the body, which made walking difficult

and running impossible,

except as a kind of dance, a sideways looping

like someone about to fall

headlong down and hug the earth, that body

they tried so hard to fix, straighten was simply mine,

and I loved it as you love your own country,

the familiar lay of the land, the unkempt trees,

the smell of mowed grass, down to the nameless

flowers at your feet—clover, asphodel,

and the blue flies that buzz over them.

Source: House of Bone (CW Books, 2007)