A sore on my leg meditates for months
before deciding it will stay. Some breaks
never heal, just congeal with the others,
my body so laced with cracks it’s whole
again. I am not pieces of myself, and yet
if you remove an arm or a leg, there I go
but for the rest of me. In some far future,
doctors will pinpoint that ancestor cell
of cancer making the body its empire.
Knees knock on doors that’ll never open
and skin thins politely so we can read
our insides. Inside us all, a baby is
building an old body to be born into.
Andrew Kozma’s poems have appeared in Rogue Agent, Redactions, and Contemporary Verse 2, while his fiction has been published in Lamplight, Daily Science Fiction, and Analog. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second book, Orphanotrophia, was published in 2021 by Cobalt Press.
