Boxer’s Fracture

I’d never broken a bone, 
I tell the X-ray tech, 
until a few days ago. 

The bright-red tomato 
dangled from a vine
where the garden fell sharply

into the gorge, and so did I,
bypassing the stairs my husband
had built for the very purpose

of not tumbling ass over 
tits down the slope. It was stupid,
I tell the doctor, the nurse

who fits my hand for the brace.
My husband, however, loves me
all the more for the fracture.

He once busted that very knuckle
years ago in a pub, against a ruddy
face that wasn’t going to shut itself.

Now I’m in the same wounded club.
By far the most common cause
of a boxer’s fracture is punching a wall.

Can you imagine the sheer asininity?
My mother once put her fist 
through drywall, nothing fractured 

but that already-broken home, 
a little more of her spirit and ours.
We can’t have nice things,

she screamed another time, proving 
her point by hurling glassware
onto the bloodied floor.

My therapist says she is astonished
that I have never done drugs, 
never even cut myself.

We turned out OK, I said 
to my brother a few months back,
before Mom got herself 

kicked out of her care home 
and put in the psych ward, before 
she had to go to the other place,

the one she hated, the one
where she took her last breath a week ago.
Tonight, on the phone again

with my brother, my husband holding
my good hand, I say nothing
about the fracture, spare him

my fable: the garden,
the red fruit, the fall.
Yesterday I told my therapist

I’m only astonished I made it
this far before I plowed
my fist into a fucking wall.