Chitra Ganesh, To Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Essay Fragment: Moral Model of Disability
| That winter we kept | finding the wings |
| of pigeons pulled from their sockets. | Viscera deleted |
| by the rain. A symbol | stripped of its meaning. |
| Worry bead mistaken | for a pebble. My mother |
| will not admit to our history | heirloom of disease. |
| Once, malformed children | were dashed against the rocks |
| slay the child, spare | your now unburdened blood. |
| My chest is rivered with cracks | my sternum broken like |
| an ox. My father tells me | that a wolf will eat |
| their own young | those too weak to survive. |
| This morning, a stranger in the strip mall | offered blessing palms |
| to pull this shattered bone into | church’s sharp-edged mercy. |
| This disabled body is always product | or vessel |
| [of sin/for mercy]. | Always this body of crooked back |
| & sidestepped gender. | Body of apple-taker |
| & rib-giver. | This body of ungiftings |
| worth praying | away. |
torrin a. greathouse is a transgender cripple-punk and author of Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020). Their work has appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, TriQuarterly, AGNI, and Kenyon Review. She is an MFA candidate at University of Minnesota and assistant editor of The Shallow Ends. (updated 9/2020)