Have You Ever Heard Of Dupuytren's Contracture?
Aside from all the obvious ailments associated with age and not worth mentioning, I’ve suddenly developed a symptom with a name I relish: “Dupuytren’s contracture,” after a physician famous for treating Napoleon Bonaparte’s hemorrhoids. What a lovely sounding French word: Du/from, puy, a homonym for puits/well, and tren for train/ train. Sounds predestined that arrière-train/rear train also refers to the derrière.
When I think of the sci-fi movie starring Raquel Welch in which a miniaturized submarine was injected into a vein in order to perform microscopic surgery, I imagine a small train racing across the network of nerves intersecting throughout my entire body, and the many stops required to extract noxious substances from invisible wells.
I look at Dupuytren’s early signs inside my palms: a tiny bone growth spurting where the smaller fingers’ proximal phalanges articulate at the level of my heart line. I’ve learned to press my hands together tightly to prevent my fingers from ever being crooked. Glad this is a yoga posture I’ve practiced for years. It is also a silent prayer.
Entrapment within a Douanier Rousseau Painting
After The Dream by Henri Rousseau
Hedy Habra‘s third poetry collection, The Taste of the Earth, won the 2020 Silver Nautilus Award, Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Awards, and was finalist for the USA Best Book Award. Tea in Heliopolis won the USA Best Book Award and Under Brushstrokes was finalist for the International Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention. She is a seventeen-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. hedyhabra.com