The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: earthwork by Jill Khoury

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content warning for blindness and child abuse

noncompliant

6
doctor wants to clarify the thin scrap of universe behind my one eye that sees using prisms / i’m treated then released into my mother’s hot palm / days-long headache rambles on into sleeplessness / i return across a medical wasteland / used hospital gowns snag against the windshields of abandoned cars / gurneys race downhill every time the wind blows / doctor says some thrive and some die / doctor says your daughter is noncompliant / our palms’ impact works a perfect clay bowl / mother’s finger her thumb my finger my thumb / she asks me to play like a soldier hold our trauma inside / i rip the plastic lens off my ugly glasses

12
after being measured in the eye laboratory i discover new levels of the hospital, rooms without numbers / locked-in women / i flee / don’t want to become a locked-in woman / i dress for a funeral every day / but my father’s gun in the nightstand is too much like surrender / i’m still young enough for my mother to haul back and slap me hard across the face don’t talk to anyone about what goes on in this family my will to continue is driven by want / someday she will touch me again but gently

18
i use my residual vision to find dismay on the adults’ faces / she is angry they couldn’t cure me / my future is the solid black of dead air on the tv / i am used to wounds and wounding the clay / i get accepted to university / the scholarship counselor says pick a career that will make a lot of money most blind people are dirt poor / laughs at me like i am a child when i say creative writing / at the last visit the doctor asks my mother not me which country will your daughter set out for now / she says she is so proud

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