REMEMBERED BACK
He stops with his boots in the mud, the smell of morning made grassy by last night’s rain. He lifts his hand to inspect the tear that throbs across the pad of his thumb. There is no way to avoid it in crossing a fence, first your weight rests on one foot, and then the other, even if it’s a bum one, and when it gives out on you, the wire bites. Shouldn’t come as no surprise, he thinks, after all this time. He raises the hand for a closer look and, as if he had asked for special attention, the sun fills it with light. The light pours into him through his palm and up his arm like a hot path of infection, up his arm, across his shoulder and chest and into his heart where it remembers him back to before he was broken, remembers him back to being whole.