Camphor Balm

a free verse poem for Climacteric: On the Turning Point

Photo by Tikkho Maciel on Unsplash

The night my husband tripped with the cast-iron pot in his hands,
spilling a caldron of boiling water onto the top soft skin of my foot,
I sobbed and scratched past the surface of time and into sixteenth
and seventeenth century Europe. The searing sea splashed over me
like a Roman invasion peeling away the flesh of my dorsum until
nothing was left…