Dancing Bones

It started with a swollen knee.  I was two and limping.
I think it was my right, although I was too young to know

one side from the other.  A fever was involved, or
the redness and heat from the swelling made it seem

feverish.  I still looked mostly normal back then.  I could
still move almost normally.  I don’t remember when

I lost my fists.  I was an elf in the Christmas Pageant
at Little Beaver.  Somewhere there are pictures

of me at five in green felt and red tights.  I wanted to be
a ballerina.  In the house on Henrietta Street, I spun

in front of my mother’s dresser mirror and blushed
like my two-year-old knee when my brother found me.

In the house on Upland, a friend of my mother’s said I had
a dancer’s figure, but by then I had no dancing bones.

My best friend in fifth grade was a dancer.  She lived in
a castle-house on Beaver Lake.  When she started on point,

she would show me her toes, how they cracked
at the knuckles, how they bled in her shoes.

 


Jessica Reed grew up in "The Paris of the South," Asheville, North Carolina, and now lives in New York.  Her poetry has appeared in Tin House Magazine, The Huffington Post, Shampoo, and LIT, and is forthcoming in The Paris Review.  She is the recipient of the 2007 Jerome Lowell Dejur Award for Creative Writing and the 2007 Marie Ponsot Poetry Prize, both from the City College of New York, where she is an MFA candidate, adjunct instructor, and Graduate Editor of Promethean.