You learn to build strength
By resistance. Hoisting the 10 pound weight
With your shattered wrist,
Screwed and bolted into a titanium plate
Inscribed with a disaster you’re
Overcoming.
If passive resistance means folding
Your hands in the semblance of prayer,
The resistance you are practicing
Is one of cold steel clutched
In your fist and lifted
Like the torch of liberty.
Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press), Dead Horses and Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press), and Properties of Matter (Aldrich Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press.