Jessica Goody

LEARNING TO WALK

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Released from the the bathysphere of the iron lung,
that claustrophobic cage,
Your legs are foreign objects, heavy and strange,
rigid as a cadaver; dead weights, flaccid as flour sacks.
Nerves like a disconnected telephone switchboard
struggle to speak, with no response, no dial tone.
Every painful step requires the concentration of a fakir
treading hot coals as easily as garden cobblestones.

Jessica Goody writes for Sunsations Magazine and The Bluffton Today. Her work has also appeared in Barking Sycamores, Kaleidoscope, Spectrum, and Cyclamens and Swords. She was awarded an Honorable Mention in the 2011 Lucidity Poetry Journal International Competition and was a Quarter-Finalist in the 2012 Mary Ballard Poetry Prize Competition. She has written two volumes of poetry and several chapbooks, and is currently at work on her first novel.