amputee

he graduated from the University of Texas

and took a black Honda Civic, a more-than-less girlfriend

with red hair and matching

bra straps, and their incubating son

to Minnesota where he secured a job building

artificial limbs. Artificial Limb Co.

said that people could live normal

lives with metal claws and feet and artificial

knees and affixed digits, in which case,

Cassy said, give me one

of each. Matthew was born and everything

worked. Keith kept working; he designed

a hand that could be a fist or point

a finger or grasp-and-not-let-go. He thought

about steel hands and silver and aluminum.

He thought about magnetic hands

and Swiss army knife hands.

Cassy left after a year, in the winter, with Matthew

who didn’t say mamama

or dadada, just ah for attention and ah

for food. Keith thought about a hand

with buttons, a hand with a joystick, a hand that stays

98.6 degrees in December. See, he said,

The best prostheses are the ones

that let people forget

what they’re missing. And Cassy said,

the week before she finished

Minnesota, why

would you want to forget.

*SO...this started as a short short story for my fiction class. We had to write an entire story in a couple paragraphs. I only recently broke it into lines, and the effect is a Billy Collins-esque poem: very narrative. You have to read it out loud, of course. :)