There are 33 joints in each foot—
hinges of flesh, bone, and bioelectric fire.
It began with Adam and Eve,
and the first suspicion of pain.
Fingers, those ten cephalic feelers,
mapped each other’s dermatomes—
a moist cartography,
each twitch an omen.
They curled into prayers or fists or pleas,
their joints aching with remembered grip,
phantom swellings, clicking doubts
that flared in the absence of injury.
Ankles, those delicate gyroscopes,
tilted in communion,
bones rolling over sinew like tides over sand—
but always, the mind mishears the surf.
Heel, arch, ball, toe—
a sacred sequence of contact and release,
now catalogued nightly in fretful repetition:
Is this stiffness new? Did that bone shift?
The feet, those twin archives of motion,
carried them through Eden’s loam,
through grit, through ash,
through every imagined rupture.
Each step a gospel of nerve and nail,
each crack a Morse code warning.
Anxiety loops around the metatarsals
like ivy climbing calcium walls.
Diagnosis: hallux valgus,
recommend surgical intervention.
But the real ache grows
in the space between scans.
Copyright © 2026 by Kashiana Singh. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 30, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
