The Toe<\/p>\n
Despite how mystically moonlight snakes a path across the lake tonight, and because love is the property solely of country music, and since Plath\u2019s bell jar of pain runneth over for all eternity, I will write only of a toe\u2014a plain enough thing\u2014the fourth toe on my mother\u2019s right foot and how each day, despite my bathing it, my application of greasy salve, the wrapping and rewrapping to apply just enough pressure, it continued to blacken, the toe like a banana past sweetness to the other side of neglect, or salt beef dried to jerky, tenderness abandoned to gristle, so I write this about my mother\u2019s toe, how the doctor tells us it must go as if speaking of an ingrown hair or a splinter, as if it were nothing important, nothing a person spent her whole life walking on, on grass, over damp-mopped kitchen linoleum, dancing backwards in high heels over slick-waxed ballrooms floors, or in babyhood grabbed for all googley-eyed and occasionally even sucked, this dried-up toe that oddly causes mother no pain, and yet when the doctor says the toe must go, this woman who was a marble column at father\u2019s bedside during his failed chemo, who later presided over father\u2019s grave, stolid as a granite headstone, and not long after, this woman who sat composed as Rodin\u2019s \u201cBather\u201d as another doctor spoke the word mastectomy to her, and all through radiation wore a Mona Lisa smile, this woman does a thing I\u2019d never seen her do, my mother cries, sobs, weeps, exhausts all the tissues in the doctor\u2019s stainless dispenser, and keeps crying over this very small rotten toe, this calamity of losing what one least expected to lose.<\/p>\n
\n <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Toe\u201d appears in the e-book anthology\u00a0Fire on Her Tongue<\/em>\u00a0(Two Sylvias Press, 2012).<\/a><\/p>\n Lana Hechtman Ayers,<\/a> originally from New York, lives in Kingston, Washington after a seventeen year sojourn in New England. She has been writing poetry since she could hold a crayon\u00a0and is now working on her first novel. Her two most recent poetry collections, What Big Teeth\u00a0<\/a><\/em>(chapbook) and A New Red<\/em> <\/a>(full-length), are concerned with the real adult life of Red Riding Hood and associates. Lana runs two poetry chapbook presses, Concrete Wolf <\/a>(national) and MoonPath Press<\/a> (dedicated to Pacific Northwest Poets). Ice cream is Lana\u2019s favorite food group.<\/p>\n \u00a0Lana will be reading new work at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle on Friday, July 27, at 7:00<\/a>, along with poets Raul Sanchez and John Burgess.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Toe Despite how mystically moonlight snakes a path across the lake tonight, and because love is the property solely of country music, and since Plath\u2019s bell jar of pain runneth over for all eternity, I will write only of … Continue reading