By Kimberleigh Costanzo
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Aging
In high school and college, my Grandma went by the nickname Mac,
and she got in trouble for starting fights with boys
wearing pants instead of skirts
always having dirt beneath her short fingernails.
Now, I watch as my Grandma’s friends carry her wine glass to her
so she doesn’t need to walk to the kitchen.
They hold her hand as she stands up,
soft flesh wrinkled and wrapped around soft flesh wrinkled.
Arthritic fingers need breaks and aching knees make standing too long tough.
A smoker’s youth makes her chest tight and stretches the hallway ahead into a marathon.
The first time she fell, I cried, thinking of her humbled by gravity and the cruelty of time.
Because to me, she has always been suspended in air,
the way all holy things are.
Kimberleigh R. Costanzo is a poet and performance artist based in Ridgewood, Queens. Their choreographic work has been presented at venues throughout New York City and developed at residency centers nationally and internationally. Their poetry has been published in Survivors Magazine. Across genre, their artistic work primarily concerns queer identity, abjection, and the body as the meeting place of the holy and the grotesque.
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