Michelle Menting

Interdigital Neuroma Sounds Like a Useless Grammatical Term

your feet are semi-colons abrupt near full stops of hurt that keep going because you make them keep going despite flares that feel like em dashes smooth bolts punctuations of nerve that are tired and confused like parentheses that don't know to close or should be brackets and end there there is no symbol for this painful repetition only the inflamed and no one knows why but surgeons want to cut to cut to cut out the nerves the tendons and into the balls the pads the ligaments quote unquote the whole compound sentence of arch and toe and revise your feet as if they are shitty first drafts and they the doctors who do not run blame the running the movement the blissful miles of trails in woods among fields out in the shade and sunlight and all the things that keep you you your mind your body your heart full not fused but run on and fused are not necessarily the same but the enjoyment of joining is there discursive sometimes perhaps maybe in fragments but whole with your pulse an ellipses an ellipses an ellipses until interdigital neuromas declare no not a pause not a break but a period a full complete stop.

Michelle Menting grew up the youngest of 12 siblings in a small and poorly insulated cottage in the Wisconsin "Northwoods" near Upper Michigan. She now lives in Maine in a house with similar insulation. Her poems, flash nonfictions. and flash fictions have appeared or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Passages North, One Art, Diagram, Cimarron Review, and other places. She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and directs a small-town library in rural Maine. www.michellementing.com