Or Someone May Purposefully Invent Your Healing

by Laura Reece Hogan

After a dolphin’s tail became tangled in a crab trap in 2005, two Hanger Clinic prosthetic experts stepped in to create a prosthetic tail, restoring her ability to swim.

You spiral and drift,

your dance reversed.

No longer a body that silvers through sea,

in command of the reef.

Like a three-month old bottlenose, you charged

into the field of crab traps.

The cords tore, ripped pieces away,

and you were left

the wrecked rudder, the lost engine. You could eddy

many ways, each a disaster.

Then some implausible someone

sees the outline of your need, the ripple and turn

of who you are intact, and inverts

the absence—

forges with just the right fingers

(so dexterous)

(so quickening)

what is missing, with an eye to your groove,

to your line and rhythm—

so you,

cherished you—not only swim, but leap.

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Laura Reece Hogan is the author of Butterfly Nebula (Backwaters, University of Nebraska Press, 2023), winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Litany of Flights (Paraclete Press, 2020), winner of the Paraclete Poetry Prize, the chapbook O Garden-Dweller (Finishing Line Press), and the nonfiction book I Live, No Longer I (Wipf & Stock). She is one of ten poets featured in the anthology In a Strange Land (Cascade Books). Her poems have appeared in America, Scientific American, Sugar House Review, RHINO, The Christian Century, Verse Daily and elsewhere.