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You are here: Home / Poetry / Exoskeleton
Exoskeleton

Poetry

Exoskeleton

As frail as I am
with my bandaged
head my
stumbling abnormality
of gait
I can still lift my son
a leg up
into the crotch
of the Kwanzan cherry.
I can still wrap
my one good arm
around his waist
and heave. I
can stand there
at sunset spotting him
in his tiger-faced rain boots
his firefighter’s costume
complete with helmet
and ear-piercing red
whistle (the hatchet had to go).
Where low sun gleams
in the eye of an exoskeleton
a tiny mirror of cicada reflects
the setting sun and worn-
out father back to himself.
That gleam is its backwards
glance, its remembrance
of the life within, the green
flag unfurled through a slit
in the spine, the spindly
man, ixnayed eastern redbud.

Cameron Morse holds an MFA from the University of Kansas City-Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife and three children. He is the author of nine collections of poetry and serves as Senior Reviews Editor at Harbor Review and a reader at Small Harbor Publishing. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. Visit his website here: https://cameronmorsepoems.wordpress.com/

Featured Artwork:

Un-naming grief

Zaynab Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer from Bobi. She is studying Medical Laboratory Science at Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto. Her works have appeared in Strange Horizons, FIYAH Magazine, Native Skin, Lucent Dreaming, Agbowó, Omenana Magazine, MaskLit, Anomaly, Night Coffee Lit, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize 2022, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a BoTN nominee and recently joined Visual Verse as an intern assistant editor. She tweets @ZainabBobi.

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