Kyphosis
Kiurn Kapur
| poetry
The god Hephaestus had it, too.
A yoke. A plow. A word
for punishment in public:
pillory. From Kyphon,
meaning bent or crooked.
I greet the diagnosis
with a recognition that’s bone
deep. What twisted me,
what cause has hurt so long,
I hunch and barely notice it at all?
The surgeon’s neat hands
demonstrate deformed
and fractured vertebrae.
His explanation’s clean
and straight. He’s not inclined
to metaphor. To work
under a weight— to show
your nature in your shape:
an ox, a crippled welder
of helmets and shields.
The lame one, the halting one,
maker of objects that can speak
to what’s unfixable, hunch-backed
above the mouth of the forge.
Kirun Kapur is the winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry and the Antivenom Poetry Award for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, Prairie Schooner and many other journals. She serves as poetry editor at The Drum and teaches at Amherst College.