MY GRANDFATHER’S THUMB
Ross White | Poetry
Perhaps now that we all have screens
and video after sickening video illuminating them,
this trick wouldn’t delight—but when I was a child,
my grandfather would sever his thumb.
He’d tug it, wiggling, away from its nub,
a few inches before he’d ease it back
to the lonely base, and if, he said, I’d watch
him spit, the thumb would reattach, as if by magic.
The man was missing a third of his pinkie,
and after the war, had a derelict hip—
and yet, for his generation, who fought in Korea,
he remained remarkably intact.
He’d seen one Navy buddy
burned alive and watched two others shot,
yet somehow still felt such delight at the frailty
of the body, the ways we break apart.
And he would giggle at my giggling,
when as soon as he’d finished his flourish
and showed me the thumb waggling
unscathed, I’d beg him to sever it again.
Ross White is the director of Bull City Press, an independent publisher of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. He is the author of Charm Offensive, winner of the Sexton Prize for Poetry, and three chapbooks: How We Came Upon the Colony, The Polite Society, and Valley of Want. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, Tin House, and The Southern Review, among others. He is Director of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-hosts The Chapbook, a podcast devoted to tiny, delightful things.