Injury Room
Through my
little window, I
see one day
the entire bird,
the next just
a leeward wing,
the next
only a painful
call, which, without
the body, makes
beautiful attachments
by even
attaching at
all.
Copyright © 2023 by Katie Ford. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 1, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“To speak plainly, I’ve been living with the aftermath of a brain injury since late 2020, a type of injury I knew nearly nothing about until it belonged to me. The isolating effects of being able to bear little light, sound, or motion are behind this bedroom poem, which the wonderful poet Carolyn Hembree, when I shared it with her, called a ‘torn sonnet.’ Being able to write again returns me to the fact that poetry is willing to absorb, and become, what's torn.”
—Katie Ford
Katie Ford
Katie Ford is the author of If You Have to Go (Graywolf Press, 2018); Blood Lyrics (Graywolf Press, 2014); Colosseum (Graywolf, 2008); and Deposition (Graywolf Press, 2002).
Ford is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the Larry Levis Reading Prize. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.