A beach block gets so quiet
with the season over,
the ocean louder.
Year-rounders grow restless.
Neighbors flirt and my father
who worked nights, the only man
around on those long afternoons.
Getting home later, missing supper,
spitting out words that made
my mother shut the window
against that salt, that cold.
You don’t know where I been,
he’d bluster. You don’t know
where I go—until she folded inside
where I was folded,
another unknown, forming.
She believed this caused
my cerebral palsy. Water
takes the shape of its container,
and we are mostly water.

—From Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011); republished here by author’s permission

Bio: Ona Gritz