Tough

They would have named you something different if you hadn’t arrived greased and furred. In the birthing room, each attending mouth drawn into every contortion of O: grief, awe, horror, growl. Your eyes were filmy, your belly radiating iron heat. Someone fed you fabrications by the spoon-full about what you could be. Love was altered to lore; touch to tough. From then on, you took everything hostage: the night’s radiance, stillness, the future. As you grew, your spine cracked with fat and muscle weight. Always a different bruise or split lip after school. Always both hands itchy with rage. Your face began to overglaze and retreat. What little soft of you turning exoskeleton. When the names were called, you went. The men would line up and fall. You were dubbed a different kind of casualty. Lost boy, even now your rock heart beats with a slow, curdling magma. It’s there, it’s there, can you feel it tense and ready under all that rust, all that armor?

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Emily Rosko’s books include: Weather Inventions; Prop Rockery, winner of the 2011 Akron Poetry Prize; and Raw Goods Inventory, winner of the 2005 Iowa Poetry Prize. She is editor of A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line and is poetry editor for swamp pink. She is a past recipient of the Stegner and Ruth Lilly fellowships. Her poems have appeared recently in Bennington Review, Epoch, Laurel Review, New American Writing, The Offing, South Carolina Review, and Third Coast. She teaches at the College of Charleston.