Karyna McGlynn
The Bad Cut
A nurse’s quick and perfunctory hands
have just closed you up,
brown and roughshod thread pulled
into a perfect cross-stitch: picture
of a hundred possible dangers—
falling ladder, foot caught
in the black train rail, centipede,
serrated knife, thorn bush—
all my fear isolated in your right temple.
They’ve cut a round window
in the protective plastic shroud,
a place in which to work without
the distraction of the whole child,
a place which just happens
to reveal your sleeping eye
in the circumference of injury.
I stare so hard, you transform—
not daughter, but mountain,
covered in a hard reflective snowskin,
dark blood winding an inevitable lava
path where the winter melts down
and moves aside to reveal the earth—
bed of gauze, a lake to catch the run-off
of your old life in the seat of a mother’s
seasonal grief, a valley from which you rise.
Cut flesh growing a million tiny bridges
as surely as you will open that eye
to the sound of someone repeating your name.
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