Once, it was glorious — lithe, flowing, carnal, capricious. So effortless, moving with abandon and finding fault with hips and lips and hair and thighs now mourned.
Watching through eyelid slits as charts become tomes of words and terms and treatments that are hard to bear, but for the alternative.
Contemporaries arm themselves with creams and steams and fillers to smooth grin crinkles, instead of saline streambeds and pinprick scars that only whisper of the pain.
Both nerves exposed, lying back to be examined, not in breathless wonder, but in studious contemplation with detached, objectifying analysis.
Knees ache from kneeling in delirious imaginings of holy men distributing alms, being poor of spirit and hope and health.
What to do with this body, not the one from before, but the one that left us here, six Fridays from nowhere?
Sarah Bigham reads, teaches, and writes in Maryland where she lives with her kind chemist wife, their three independent cats, and an unwieldy herb garden.
Categories: Poetry, Themed, Unseen
Tags: health, illness, medical treatment, Sarah Bigham, spoonie, spoonies, Syndromes and Lies, themed, Unseen
