Amy Lemmon
Fracture Season
My god the breaks we lived through—
snapped eyeglasses,
chipped dinner plate,
pillowcase ripped,
mug handle cracked,
bent door-closer, crushed a bit more
with each door-swing.
No surprise, after all, to find
two years later an ankle turned,
a tiny fracture,
chit of bone dislodged.
Oh how we tried, but no—
no boot or brace, no velcro,
no gorilla glue or black electrical wire,
no duct tape, epoxy, patch, or threaded needle
could set this home, this body back to rights.
Amy Lemmon’s poetry collections include Saint Nobody (Red Hen Press) and The Miracles (C&R Press). Her writing has appeared in The Best American Poetry, Rolling Stone, American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Slowdown Podcast, and many other venues. Recipient of a Franklin Research Grant and fellowships from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation and Sewanee Writers’s Workshop, she is Professor of English at the Fashion Institute of Technology-SUNY and lives in Queens, NYC.