False Elegy
By Jane McKinley
We’re talking on the phone, as we do now several times each day, when my sister asks if I’ve written a poem about her foot. No, I say, it’s not the sort of subject I would choose. She doesn’t know I specialize in elegy, that she’d have to lose it first, the way she lost a toe, a piece of bone, an ounce of flesh, her own vision of the last twenty-three years. She doesn’t hear me think about the way she scrambled syllables when she was small—tail nose for toenails— or of the August she was two, parched by fever, her body hollowed, when we played tea party, sipping endless water from blue willow cups.
Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble. She is the author of Vanitas (Texas Tech UniversityPress, 2011), which won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize, and Mudman, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In 2023 she was awarded a poetry fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
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Evocative. And losing a toe seems bad enough. I treasure my own sister conversations; thanks for this poem.