She has a bruise on her left knee
reminiscent of science-book nebulas,
and the veins reaching into her palm
look like the ivy vines wrapped around
the old oak at the end of my grandmother’s

driveway. But as she presses contacts into each eye,
her pupils dilate and contract like a camera
lens shifting to accommodate for motion
blurry as her unaided vision, and her wrists
crack as if made of ill-fitted cogs chipping away--

both a tempest-tide and midnight snowfall,
yet the sum of neither.