PHYSICAL THERAPY

She massages the scar, small circles with an index finger on my chest's red line. [...]

by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

She massages the scar,
small circles with an index finger
on my chest’s red line.

What once was private and sexual
is now in the public domain,
though there’s intimacy still

in the vulnerable altered
body, so that hours after
the scar’s been touched, I

sit beside myself in a public
space, diffused, remapping
my flesh, lost breast visible

in my shirt’s different drape,
skin healing over bone, arm
rehinging, a stranger’s face registering

my half-inch hair, what manner
of being? until sunlight finds its way
through the latticed glass panes—

I am here.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Kathryn Kirkpatrick, poet and literary scholar, is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Our Held Animal Breath (2012), which was selected by poet Chard DeNiord for the NC Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Award.

She is also the editor of two collections of essays on Irish writers, Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities (University of Alabama Press, 2000) and, with Borbála Faragó, Animals in Irish Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2015).

Find out more here.

PHYSICAL THERAPY

by Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Monika Kozak