We share, in a way,
a capsule of immiscible love.
I have not the sort of bones
one takes home to the table
for Christmas Dinner.
To meet the meat of stampeding hooves
dialing in judgement from a touch-tone phone.
"She has only one leg?" Aghast. Gassed.
Out of kidness, curtain silence falls.
I drink pity for breakfast
and vomit its remains with will.
Drop my single foot as a stick in the ground—
drive it hard to stake a tent of grace,
which vacillates from weak to worse.
I have stacks of stories, all horrific:
until there is barely room for another knife.
What lies beneath these leather scars
are daisies crushed, sand dollar dreams
and the chalk of fury lathered
by the wild call of proving my worth.

Tender bubbles beneath my skin
have not been touched, because.
I've been tripped, duped, tied
by stares and stairs.
I climb them, when I can,
in the darkness of backs turned,
so my limp is leveled by the
pageant of their silk ballet.
Bubbles proceed to fly, but
only where it is safe
and that is in your arms.
Ours is not greeting card love—
with stickers of poise on ballroom floors.
But a smacking, sacred kind:
dodging the sting of defeat;
two hummingbirds tapping out sweet spots
of plain brown-wrapper tragic times.