Katherine D. Perry

Finding Legs

My signature danced like water in my eyes. Somehow, my flimsy body,
shaking like a red maple leaf, made it from limb to ground
without cracking, without crumbling
and the arms of the wheelchair clung strange, like they knew
I was numb, like my torso would wake at any moment and fall forward.

A nurse came and took my purse, took Chapstick from my pocket,
then the pen from my hand before taking the belt from my loops
and lead me to a room where I could shut the door and cry alone.

A moment of grace
between horrors of dreams and new life:
between bark and concrete, light wind moving me down:
awake on a bed I hoped never to feel again; sheet I hoped to forget.

A moment of grace:

Coming to

I thought

coming   to consciousness

  to reckoning
  to blows

with myself, with a wall

and in a sterile room, in a foreign place where underpaid nurses jostle me harshly

A moment of grace:
I run my fingers down those waking legs that could be mine,
that could move again.

Katherine D. Perry is assistant professor of English at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama.  She is a specialist in American  literature and women's poetry.  She also teaches for the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project, and some of her work has appeared  in  Borderlands, Women's Studies, RiverSedge, Rio Grande Review, and  13th Moon