toenail raze something like nine years ago, i slammed you into an acoustic guitar without meaning to. i was half-asleep, feeling my way through the darkness of my room, trying to turn a fan off or a light on, or maybe i was sleepwalking with all the windows open. you turned colours i didn't know nails could be. i sprayed you with something that was supposed to combat a fungal infection. it didn't make a difference. there wasn't any fungus alive in you. the part of you that was lost grew back wrong, biting into skin that would always be indifferent to your hunger, until the day you relaxed your jaw and became the thick alien protein you are now. you're like me. not bent. not broken. changed. evidence of your undoing lives on in a slab of satin-coated mahogany. a little divot in the shape of a hesitant smile. a scar i don't see unless i look for it. 220127 ... tender_square i had this brutal ingrown toenail once, a sudden switchblade slicing skin, making it ooze. i flipped to “podiatrists” in the phone book. when the first guy didn’t answer, i called the second. at my appointment, i shimmied onto a table while a white-haired doctor inspected my foot wearing magnifying goggles. no one had ever been so up close and personal with my feet before, it was unnerving. he numbed my big toe with a needle, cut the wayward nail. as he was bandaging me up, he said, “how did you find me?” which i thought was an awkward fucking question. i hesitated. shifted in my seat. “uh…good, i guess? i’ve never had to see someone for something like this before.” “no, i mean how did you come across my services.” he seemed exasperated. i reddened. “oh! i looked you up in the yellow pages.” i managed to keep myself from mentioning that he’d been my second choice, that i moved in alphabetical order. after my appointment, i had to wear flip-flops as my big toe healed, which was a no-no working at the dollarama even though we sold them there. i could be liable to drop a box on my bare foot or trip with the lip of the sandal on a step stool while stocking. pain which would’ve been a lot easier to live with than that damn ingrown nail. 220127 ... nr my big toes are missing theirs 220127 ... kerry a touchy subject for me... lost one while tubing in a river after it was crushed at a soccer game a few days before one ingrown (partially removed) and one with athlete's foot (also partially removed) and my dad had trench foot on his for decades after serving in vietnam and now obsesses over cleaning out the tub post-shower. *shudder* 220129 ... ovenbird For weeks it must have been plotting, waiting for just the right moment to thrust its dull edge beneath a flap of flesh, to prise it loose, like forcing a butter knife beneath the lid of a jam jar to get at the sticky mess inside. I woke in the 2 a.m. darkness to the rhythmic beat of pulsing pain. It amazes me that such a small thing can hurt so much–just a tiny sliver of nail breaking the skin, but the pain is unbearable. I am forced to become a surgeon, slicing into myself in the blinding light of the bathroom. The tools of my trade are improvised. (“Bobby pin, please…tweezers, please…clippers.”) I cut away the offending fragment, pull it bloody from the wound, smear everything with antibiotic ointment, and bandage it inexpertly. I swallow a few ibuprofen and go back to bed where I can still feel the beat, beat, beat of my heart in my damaged toe. But it’s quieter now. Less insistent. Eventually I sleep and in the morning the pain has receded, at least enough to walk. It seems unfair, I think. I’m not even safe from the malicious intent of my own wayward body, which grows in all the wrong directions. In a dream I yell, “I don’t want to be here! I want to be dead!” and it’s a thing that has sometimes been true in life. There is no way to be completely safe. My own mind could turn on me at any moment. But for now I tend to what cruel keratin has done. I tend to all that is broken. 260609 what's it to you? who go blather from