Suddenly We
Disability, a tense steel umbilical cord plucking
its steady one note of need, coupling us outside
the palace of your uterus, in emergency rooms
where my wheelchair bullies clocks to rewind
until I am suddenly we, blind labor linking us;
me at thirty, you at seventy to portable bedside
commodes, to prescription regimes, our eyes
a synapse apart search the day for my seizing
limp right arm lost in a coat sleeve. I live wired
to a baby monitor between our beds, strumming
the singular note my helpless hand can no longer
play. I am still shrinking inside my stroke, caged
within our common carefree before, impossible
afternoons under Haifa almond blossoms, us two
divided even as we embraced, a buoyancy in swimming
pools, a cadenza of two notes in flea markets, in SoHo
alley cafes, elbows skipping past Degas at the Met or up
Rue Saint-Honoré. Two solitaires strung tight, then loose.
My legs heading to Cambridge while you imaged breast
cancer a few cities away. How unprepared we are, three
years or decades into the foreign zip code of umbilical
disability, our stomachs slammed against another shade
of night, your forehead creased with my pain, your blues
bloodshot with my hemorrhage, my body a missing half
of who I am meant to be, cleaved to a black childhood, to us
a mess of memory, penned in parentheses, our cut contiguous
tissue reissued. We pray and fall prey to poetry, our shared
lonely note hours pick along our dark, sacred umbilical cord.
Grace Lynn
Grace Lynn is an emerging painter who lives with a chronic illness. Her work explores the intersections between faith, the natural world, art, and the body. In her spare time, Grace enjoys listening to Bob Dylan, reading suspense novels, and investigating absurd angles of art history.
