Jill Khoury

Paper Dancing Girl
In Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” a one-legged toy soldier loves a paper ballerina.
An evil puppet intervenes in their love, a fickle child throws the soldier into the fire, and the two lovers
are burnt up together.


I imagined how the muscles hugged
the long bones of your thigh
to make you stand so rooted to the earth,
all your weight on one leg, like a dancer.
From where you stood, I too was an unlikely
silhouette frozen in action. You fell
for the illusion, a bird that thinks
he spies his mate. Instead, a showy flower
waits for him, throat open. We each saw
something rare in the other’s lines.
You came from the mold as you were.
You fell into place with your comrades.
We knew our role was to entertain,
not to think or feel. But the rhinestone
stitched to my breast sparkled and flamed;
but a storm sucked you out the window;
but you returned. From the doorway
to my palace I saw what you could not:
the hand of a little giant enveloped you,
sent you tumbling into the fire.
I leaned out, arabesque of longing,
and made a wish.




She’s Chronic

I can’t rouse myself to moving
with her on top of me. This muse
likes domination. She pins my wrists,
founders me with her slight weight,
sharp shapes.
She whispers say you love me,
plays each axon with a barbed wire
bow. Today it’s the space where head
meets neck. Yesterday, right elbow.
Day before, sacroiliac crest.
Say you’re blessed. She gently
shoves her fist in my mouth. My eyes
roll back. At times like these I tell myself,
just breathe. She makes me seize.
I flip upside down, hang myself
off the couch, head toward floor.
She counts with me C1, C2, C3
then sticks a fork in my ear and twists.



Asterisk

August 9, 2012

Garden Inn

In the garden room my doctor bids me luxuriate.

            Finally when the meds kick in, I can.

August sunshine warms the plate glass, cozies

            the sheets, chenille duvet. The walls are pale green.

My mother calls me. The secret shape is of an asterisk:

            thing implied but unstated in the body of the text. See

the diagnostic manual. This hotel vacation trumps

            in-patient psych incarceration. At the restaurant

(Breakfast for one?) the hostess asks me where I’m from.

            I answer Here with no corollaries. Your hair’s so pretty.

I play with it self-consciously and offer her the smile

            I save for strangers who are kind. Is everyone

here paid to be this nice? Imagine, she didn’t even earn

            a PhD.

                        I’m relaxing here en suite because of fleas

and OCD. Each black as a stitch, I had felt the bugs bore into me,

            then bolted into the shower, watched them endlessly

sluicing toward the drain, stared down that silver circle

            with its myriad black holes, ensuing catacomb of pipes.

The invisible is everywhere : this thought unhinged me.

            In the hotel lounge the glass-topped end tables have tree trunks

instead of legs. The meds arrive by courier, discreetly. I sip lemonade

            make lists of coping strategies, text my husband

{{{{{{{{anxiety}}}}}}}} and plan for home with affirmations, jeans

            and wrist-length sleeves. I had a Jewish student once

who said in Hebrew school we couldn’t show our elbows

            or our knees. My knees are pocked with bright

red welts— ankles too, belly, wrists. I think of the Latin

            name for cat flea, something felix. I’m prohibited

from Internet, from finding Latin names, also from reading

            how my mother can die nerve by nerve, in doctor-

speak. I set my cup of lemonade atop the knobby trunk, the broad

            glass circle. I choose one cookie, consider two.

Tomorrow I go home. My calm is chemical, corralled

            in squares of ballpoint pen on hotel stationery.

Trouble in the blood is real? perceived? I dream a swath

            of impenetrable skin wide enough to cover me, elbow to knee.

Atlanta International Airport, Part 1

I am not my body

                        [insert hundred-dollar bills]

            [fold / unfold]

when the plane ingests, egests me

——at two years old, miracle my pink sacs

                        stayed inflated, humming, oxygen on time.

            How many times we didn’t die, mother.

That signifies for me, or signified——

I am the movie of my body.

                        You are the conflict. I try

            to disremember chromosomal history, inhabit only

my choreographed movements:

shuttle, street, curb, sidewalk, door

elevator

Now I am on the inside of the pane, high-rise.

                        Me who could have been you, who—

            there but for anorexia mirabilis

go I,

stashing my compass up my sleeve.

                        Several masks elaborate

            on your condition pre-and post-.

They pivot, trade scorecards.

Did you know this is what it would be like

                        when there was no longer a you to tear her hair

            and cry into the phone

about it?

Now, metonymical vessel

                        the miracle

            you’ve waited for:

to be poured into a shape that holds.

Fireball

At twenty-two I chased my devils
with anything hella hot, double
dares involving Aftershock,
shot after shot, tonguing the last
bit of gold from the bottom
of the glass. Midnight alone
in the English building’s stygian
lav, I leaned against ochre
cinderblocks and laid myself
open for boys I didn’t love,
then crammed two bloody fingers
down my throat to retch a river.
My hair was shaved and dyed
like sunset. My sign is fire.



Jill Khoury earned her Masters of Fine Arts from The Ohio State University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including Sentence, RHINO, Rufous City Review, and Harpur Palate. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize twice by Breath and Shadow: A Journal of Disability Culture and Literature, and has a chapbook, Borrowed Bodies, from Pudding House Press. She blogs about disability, writing, and art at quixotic-a.blogspot.com.