Trapped in a full-body cast, both femurs broken, held
together with steel pins, I read. I listen to my transistor
radio, single earplug transporting Eight Days a Week
until I know every note of every 1964 Beatles song.
It’s hot on my bed so I teach myself to roll over, a baby,
twisting, pushing the triangle of my legs, (connected
by a bar for loading me in the back of a station wagon)
swinging them up against the wall, rocking my torso
so I fall on my stomach. Anything to feel eight-year-old
muscles, heart, lungs. Every couple of weeks, the doctors
cut me open with an electric saw, like an avocado, seed
peeling, furry with dark hair I didn’t have before. Naked,
I lie on the table before these men, no room for shame.
After three months, I’m free, and they soak me in a pool,
softening my knee joints so a WAVE named Peaches can
bend them back little more each day; each day I scream
a little less. I learn to walk again. The girls down the street
teach me the Swim, the Hitchhiker, the Dog. I’m good at it.
Sometimes my mother orders me to dance for company.
Show them your scars. I pull up my shorts for strangers
to see the six-inch gashes, each with eight big stitch marks.
Her favorite is the dimples from the pins, which she shows
her guests. Also her nineteen-inch waist, six marriage
proposals, perfect skin. She sends a note to my teacher that
I’m to leave class to wash my face with Phisohex every day.
I lie on her bed; her pinches rupture, hurt, scar. My breasts
wait inside, worried. Somehow, I teach myself to shine through
my skin. One day at the Y, my child says, It’s your scar journal!
Yes! I reply, choosing to believe what she says is in fact true.
In my dream, a doctor lifts my shirt without asking. What a mess,
she says. You have to choose: one breast or none. I tell her,
Take both. But is wholeness an either-or, all-or-nothing thing?
Just take one. I say. Just then, my stretch marks begin to glow,
rays of the sun and moon, my life.
Award-winning poet Kathryn Jordan holds an M.A. from UC Berkeley. Her work appears in the Comstock Review, The Sun Magazine, Atlanta Review, New Ohio Review, and Catamaran Literary Reader, among others. She loves to hike the East Bay Hills listening to birds and taking pictures.
