This is not the feeling
you uncurl from so easily;
it knocks your bones into shivers
and swallows the skin,
curves ever further into your ribs
until you cannot open up again.

You will crack for all the ways
your spine has shifted itself in spirals,
for the fingers furled into fists,
the tapping along your collarbone
that will guide your shoulders back
into the hunch over your sternum
every few pulls of an aching tendon.

But you will learn to stretch,
bud from marrow
into a flowering of limbs
someday,
someday.

DANICA SMITH is a writer based in upstate New York and Montreal, where she is studying political science and history at McGill University. She has been writing poetry for several years, as well as fiction.

Copyright © 2018 by Danica Smith. All rights reserved.