Your hips are girded with titanium
lustrous screws threaded femur to acetabulum
Mine at seventy still shimmy, wiggle, bop
I teach dance on Zoom—I love to jump!
Yet underneath my booty-shaking sass
lurk your hipbones—friable, precarious
One gave way when you were eighty
you bounced back, a poster girl for therapy
But the second hip—you were so frail
a sneeze knocked you over and snap
Our mother line, small shtetl Jewesses
needed no Thera-bands, no leg presses
They lugged goods to market, hauled water from the well
their feet bunioned and bones like steel
Sitting at your bedside as hospice workers come and go
I imagine a field where they gather: those
grandmothers who gave us their birdlike frames
they wait for you, who lived beyond their dreams
I see you run to them, your legs whole again
a warble comes from their throats—you know this song
you join hands, dance, take wing.
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