Surgery

Sliced like an apple, my red skin peeled back and flapping,
my white bones punctured and pounded, sawed apart
and mended with stainless and plastic. I am better

now the doctors say. But how will my flow of blood
and life move up and down my leg with this dam
of modern miracle? I am a garden of pallid tulips

tenacious and frail and accented by curls of manmade
structure as if life becomes more valid when accessorized
by imagination and construct, a statue or a poem.

— VH McKinnie

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