Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “A Rheumatoid Arthritis Love Song” by Kelly S. Thompson.

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A Rheumatoid Arthritis Love Song

By Kelly S. Thompson

I used to wear heels, oversexed

come-fuck-me kind

dance-on-top-of-the-speaker kind

spikes spearing song notes

each step, a strut

perfunctory press of heel

to toe, saying

this is a beat you can drum to

with a body that hums the words.

Trade heels for granny’s braces

plastic cage fashionless kind

make-a-mould-of-your-appendage-and-build-it kind.

My able-bodied image laid to sepulcher in favour

of limps from point A to B

to knee saying

Disability, not danger, is my middle name

syllables snaking from my proud mouth

while my husband cuts my ribeye and pretends this is love’s work

and not pity’s.

The rheumatologist holds exposing films

hungry joints

consumed with flares, tines poised

to cloudy administrative light.

Try a squat, he’ll say, ears turned and fork-like, and then,

your body is musical

like a purring violin

not the wet plastic wrap crunch I’d described.

Once home, I set my new stage.

The braces—they’re bows now, slick

them with resin, blow away

the dust

left behind.

The pills—they’re a tuner, pluck

strings snapping against prescription bottles.

Create that opus from neck to tailpiece

and dance

to music that warps artist to will.

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Copyright © Kelly S. Thompson

Previously published in the way out is the way in (League of Canadian Poets, 2021).

Kelly S. Thompson is an award-winning writer with an MFA and PhD in Creative Writing. She has made both the long and shortlists for the CBC Nonfiction and Fiction prize, has been shortlisted for two National Magazine Awards, and has writing in publications across North America. Both of her memoirs, Girls Need Not Apply and Still, I Cannot Save You were instant bestsellers, with her second shortlisted for the Nova Scotia Book Awards Nonfiction Prize. Her third book, Disciplinarian, releases April 2027. She instructs creative nonfiction at the University of King’s MFA.

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