[over] extended, by Janice Colman

Figure, Dog, and Birds, by Joan Miró (Spain) 1946

[over] extended

1)
lamentations of a limb locked    
in extension:       in quicksand my dorsal midline  
                             causes pain. sliced, the fish's backbone toward the tail, a row 
                             of bottom fins removed by guiding a knife 
                             along fin bones causing stiffness in joints 
 
or muscles: a retired Penguin editor plastic-wraps 
electrocuted rodents in her apartment’s side freezer      
          
2)
hypermobility: courting sprains and strains
dislocating joints that POP out
               poor balance     co-ordination     thin s t r e t-
               c h y skin       the body floats    forward→
 
too wilful to wait for the limb   to retract to
its rightful position       the body forges 
forward   mutates into an eel skinny 
 
as a flat line    or sky-
scraper which is hard    labour so vast the sky 
 
witness an eel like a shooting star    the hunt 
for the missing eel     did you look 
in the master bedroom       under 
the covers curled like a dizzy snail 
 
a shape with edges rounded 
            off    so that corners fall away        & containment falls away
            & all joints are hyper                            extended I am over
 
I am winter tide blasted, I am flatliner fluorescent 
green & sea salt on a heron’s wings, I am a gasp  
of wind with maroon leaves & serrated edges   
I am a dull knife since the knife sharpener’s horse
retired long ago.  
 
3) my Aunt Bertha tallied 
The Accounts, stacked up monies in/out    
on her Montgomery Ward Signature 9900 
Electric Adding Machine Calculator Box
 
Bertha played piano, the skin on her fingers
transparent as wax  she practiced four hours every 
day   when she was a young woman she fell
in love with her piano teacher     his hair like steel
piano strings    she 
 
remained single with a substantial
waist    frequented restaurants   symphonies 
ballet too    she wore hats with feathers angled
up    she wore her bosoms large    
 
I have medium bosoms, large muscles and the strength 
of my grandmother a farmer’s daughter who fled 
the pogroms    my grandmother over-extended across 
an ocean when finally on dry 
 
land     met&married Samuel who swagged 
Smirnoff before amputating 
his trigger finger to avoid the Russian draft
mine are the hands of an ancient gardener   
 
4)
a hippocampus is a curved seahorse-
shaped organ on the underside of each 
temporal lobe where memory/learning/
 
navigation & perception of space receive 
information from a cerebral cortex stretched thin & over
extended by a joint in the limb, the angle 
 
between the bones   
 
a door with rusted hinges that holler 
at the wind, lamentations of a limb locked 
without bending.

​Janice Colman

​Born in Montreal in 1948, Janice Colman is an emerging Toronto poet, Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Martha Award recipient, and a two-time Toronto Arts Council grant recipient. Her work has been published in the temz Review, filling Station, Arc, long con Magazine, The New Quarterly, Freefall Magazine, and Over/Exposed Lit. Janice is the mother of two powerful daughters and the human guide of an 8-dog trail-hiking pack.