My right arm casted, this poem has little choice
but to wend, flesh-bare and wan through Percocet
dreams where bones severed, coalesce. Like Neolithic
ground offering up the remains of an infant
arranged in its mother's embrace, pain is less than
the salient need to signal a presence, compassion,
a quest for truth elusive as the tickle I can’t reach. At best
I am less garrulous—forced, left-handed, to peck images
clean as children in the woods, winter's end, waiting
their turn at a blackened pan to scoop maple-drenched
snow. Ice beneath the surface. Cutting through bone
a harbour entrance for shards that prick and abrade
until we elevate the limb, excavate the fragment
that yields a name.
