Back Brace
Tara Proper
The huddled vertebrae bracket themselves,
warding incursion, knotting the spine,
and I am slender supine
in my bone-colored
brace, skin-seams callousing, form colluding
against shape.
The back aches for the exactitude
of even shoulders and legs—a reclamation
of balance. The genius of 90 degrees
flush flat against a chair’s back—against the squeeze
of constraint.
Like a saint, I am beyond bodily.
I have transubstantiated
from C-curve to X-Axis
from mass to matter
from filament to fiber
and there is no purity, only exoneration,
only enamel-laden reformation.