by Candice Kelsey

Broken again, littlest
one throbbing
its fight song pink, loud
like hunger or identity
and the big toe shifts
like my father in a chair
at Sunday sessions
mandatory at the EDU
for a daughter in treatment
circle of silent wedges
father unhappy as
the neighbor’s cat Blue
who hates her home
bounds up cement stairs
where I sit with today’s
plate of oranges
halved she capsizes
a feline Michelangelo
painting the Sistine or God
and blots my toe
with a cool bingo nose
she too knows injury
touches the gnarled-speck
perimeter of my foot
now a flesh canvas
cathedral scene on a ceiling
and I am broken
by a hundred Adams
awful fools busy naming
the garden of my body—
it’s the world
that catches the fragile
on sharp corners
hobbles us unsuspecting
mid-step a broken cuneiform
tablet remnant
of private dislocations
and yet
like this little piggy
some of us make it home
somehow I make it
all the goddamn way

Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a poet, educator, activist, and essayist from Ohio and living bicoastally in L.A. and Georgia. Her work appears in Passengers Journal, Variant Literature, and The Laurel Review among others. A finalist for a Best Microfiction 2023, she is the author of six books. Candice is a mentor for incarcerated writers through PEN America and serves as a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. Find her at candicemkelseypoet.com.