I’m lying in bed but my legs feel
roughly half the length they should be.
I’d dreamt I smuggled a fat person into a fast food franchise,
so it has been a productive day thus far.
But these legs bother me.
Am I walking on what should be the knees?
Wouldn’t my life have been entirely different if my legs crept
down for several more inches? At the movie
last night a giant woman beat me into the bathroom.
What if I had her legs? Thighs like a freeway underpass?
Calves screaming in the stock yard to gallop free? I’d rule the world
instead of just this dream, lugging my special burden.
The Russian proverb: a small dog stays
a puppy longer broods me. Look, I did mail that check
to the therapist, OK? He’s not sitting with the new patient, frowning,
thinking: you ungrateful jerkoff who I helped and helped, you never paid me
while the poor patient quakes with neuralgia in the shit storm of the soul,
wondering what hit him. Now he’s calm. Paid.
I did that. Me and my small feet.
Merridawn Duckler is a writer from Portland, Oregon. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in TAB, Zone 3, International Psychoanalysis, Really System, Rivet Journal, Rogue Agent, Unbroken Journal, The Offing, Otis Nebula, Crab Creek Review. Recent humor in Defenestration. She was a finalist for the 2016 Sozoplo Fiction Fellowship. She’s an editor at Narrative and at the international philosophy journal Evental Aesthetics. On twitter as MerridawnD.
–Background & Foreground Photography by Jon Damaschke