fracture story
by nell wright
Fracture Story
by Nell Wright
It was a beautiful place, horizon on all sides
like diner mirrors. I sped
toward its limit and hit the asphalt hard. My arm
in the X-ray glowed like a jellyfish at night
and I wanted to slip into its ocean and go
totally numb. I wanted
to fix what I’d done, but the doctor said
Stay patient, massaging my plaster with soap.
On the radio they spoke
about a meteor shower, so we spread old
towels in the darkest back yard. While we waited
someone laid out an endless riddle
about albatrosses. Cannibalism was the answer.
Inside me, minerals were mending themselves,
sending collagen threads across
the bad chasm I’d made. From behind a wide cloud slid
stars like flecks of bone, old and glowing.
They held their breaths. When one dashed
across the black, I think I gasped
admiring the platonic plummet: it left
no fallen body. No broken heft.
In the morning I got up and walked
to the laundromat. Mountains ran
a cardiogram across the sky. Inside
two parts of me were reaching
toward each other—something I’d felt
before, but more in the mind. I started
to forgive myself. It
was a physical place. Hard
to be lonely carrying that slow embrace.
there is something about the image of a broken arm that i associate with innocence. it feels like such a child’s injury: something that happens when you throw yourself around, unafraid of what might happen, unaware of the power of your body to hurt itself when it collides with the world. Nell Wright understands this collision—she sees the stars as bones, the mountains as the image of a beating heart, the meteors some kind of perfect falling that, astonishingly, breaks nothing. i love the phrase stay patient in this poem. stay patient as in wait, wait for yourself to heal (both physically and emotionally), but also stay patient as in stay a patient. a doctor’s patient, but also a patient of your own body, working to heal itself, to pull itself back together without you even being aware of it, and a patient of the world, which shows its beauty to you to help you heal. xo sam