Playing Rugby in Limbo

My neck won't twist.
I've taken four painkillers
and melted three ice packs
but this corkscrew won't budge.

My neck looks perfect
compared to my volcanic knees.
Smudged pebbles
on white snow,
my shin reeks the
rubble of a thousand broken cliffs.

The boned bumps
complement my
mom's own jewelry collection.
Her Bronx childhood
tattooed into her calf.
Schoolmates would take
an antique pole
and throw it at
a moving target.
A regular
duck, duck, goose.
When mom became
the prey
her short legs,
soft squeal,
branded her
before the first shot.

She bled.
Cleansed.
Wept.
The wound of
fifty years,
a motherless school girl,
broken steel in her bone.
Doc, what is your prescription?
There were no stitches,
or social workers,
or suspicious teachers.
The indent changed
cartilage with the light,
the composition of her toes,
and the validity of the story,
but her father
remained unscathed.

The hand print on my
own bicep
is it's own celebrity.
It remains intimate
but mysterious.
A mark by a stranger,
a woman's fading fingerprint,
close enough to my chest
to seem dangerous.
The bruise is a blurry siren
but it holds innocent truth.
My failed ruck,
lazy sprint,
skipped squats,
and unwrapped tackles.

The mark on a body
has feminized
into magical cover up.
I show my own
for those
whose gripped
impressionism
is jailed.
For a body
that reminds
me of laying on grass,
watching the clouds pass by.
The nebulous vein
and it's flooding rapids,
trapped and caught,
held for a week.