Meditation on the Pinky Toe

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.