Laurie Clements Lambeth

THE SELECTION OF A CHILD FOR ILLNESS, A FABLE

They stood each child,
one at a time, back against
the wall with uneven pocks.

Get the knife, one would say.
And the other would extract
the largest knife from the drawer.

People are often alarmed
when I tell this story,
which is not a story, but

a ritual, the tool a knife, yes.
I was afraid just the once,
then acquiesced. One parent

would slide the knife's wide
side across the crown of each
child's head, one by one. It felt

cool like a crown, and flat.
When we heard the tight poke
of the blade's tip in wall,

we learned to duck away.
Then the yardstick and pencil.
These were our measures.

Our parents used a knife
to prepare us for what might
frighten but shouldn't, for a kind

of courage. Growing taller
than the wall's scars meant
we had passed its pain,

and when the last of us
never grew past her highest mark,
the knife carved linked holes

every time a little deeper, wider.
A new chart required for the life.
The wall dug its own scars–scleroses–

deep into her brain and spine,
but she, distracted by shapes
she found in knots of wood–

knife ticks mere shading on a bear,
eye, or bird–let it all in,
unaware yet she could take it.

Laurie Clements Lambeth's debut collection, Veil and Burn (UIP 2008), was selected by Maxine Kumin for the 2006 National Poetry Series. An MFA and PhD graduate from the University of Houston, she has published her poems and essays in The Paris Review, Crazyhorse, The Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Her poems are included in two new anthologies, Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. She is currently at work on a memoir and her second collection of poetry, Bright Pane.