sheltered space

"The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently—or not so silently—at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time." ~ Ellen Samuels

//

I have a slow-burn temper scaling

your stairs with splintered fingers,

indignantly denying assistance - reminiscent

of able-bodied tunnel vision from adolescence.

I inherited a stoniness toward men, amplified

by my body's rebellion. Saving up

to buy a shower chair before my 23rd

birthday. A cheetah-print cane. I only

let my hair down in your bed where

you anoint me with peppermint oil

as salt melts on my tongue with stifled tears -

allergic to gravity and expecting punishment

born of indulgence: dirty sheets swaddling bodies

suspended from first light, whispering

"good morning" into your hairline. We latch

not for the sake of recovery. I peel back

the curtains with cosmic uncertainty.

//

Order me a silent confession with helpless

heat - an Indian summer - the hours

I finally allowed myself to shapeshift.

I'll write it on your back (a gun on the nightstand),

sandpaper neck and a crystal ball skull.

I'll trace it into your bathroom mirror with

desperate breath (invisible disability,

casual flesh). I'll ask you to love me

(with breaks in between) by the light

of the refrigerator. I'll teach you my body's

invocation of time - stubborn, vast; lovely, weary -

I'll teach you forgiveness in a language

of frown lines and thin skin. My art

of clinging and parting. Remember, as I do,

that crip time is intimacy, unyielding

transformation. Punctuated desire.

Crip time finds an exoskeleton to don in the

dark and can’t bear its weight by dawn.

//

You hold my hips as a futurist, encircle

me in the sheltered space just shy

of a sick bed. Patternless, we rest and

rise, disembodied and beautifully bruised.

//

Publication Credit: 'Sheltered Space...' first appeared in the Mersey Review Issue 2