Elizabeth Metzger

Because you were born with your knees tied together under you you are bound to need your hands and resent my knees. Because you were born with and without knees your face remains close to the ground to analyze all the methods the medics use to unhook them: they splint your legs against planks, numb each knee with a balm that makes you feel you are flying through stone. Now you crouch ready to doubt, blinking because it is your body’s to blink. You smile, invincibly obscured. From any closer I couldn’t take you whole so you imagine your hands luring my knees into both sides of your mouth and open your smile into a needy room — molded behind your teeth, a person of pity held down in thick liquid shame. Because you were born to be happy you would skin and uncap the knee of a good giant to make yourself a helmet that could guard you from under the brain, but you cannot get up off those knees.