Parts
It feels a little strange at 62
to think my body now is partly new,
to walk around with this inside of me,
a fake left hip, the right one soon to be
made of plastic too, some sort of chrome
hammered to my thighbone’s aging home,
to be patched with pieces not quite mine,
as though I’d been conceived by Frankenstein –
to know I’m flesh and bone but also robot,
part human being, alive and real, part not,
yet what I’ve always been, I suppose –
part soft, part hard, part poetry, part prose,
part weak, part strong, since birth this confliction –
mostly truth, but also (wink) some fiction.
Ms. Hempel is the author of the poetry collections Second Rain (Able Muse Press, 2016) and Building Chevys (Pine Row Press, 2022)
Here’s a link to her latest book: