#roxanna bennett

[collectingpoetry]

ID in alt text and below cut

[Visual ID: Black text on white background that reads: "The Trick Roxanna Bennett

Let me be a ''poet of cripples" not a patient etherized upon a table, not a brain floating within a body. In a moment I must be a body in the place incision produces in a body, previously intact. Inert, poor body, inarticulate. Pain flees from the word "pain." Between meaning and the unmeaningable is the trick of thinking I can fix what I can name. Inertia insists on comfortable contraries, less on chastened patients. Let me be any other word, any other body: stone, swan, sycamore. Perform patience full time; retirement a normate luxury I will not be afforded. My need to mean alien to the pain, yet I remain, unseen." End ID.]