Lazarus

I’d cut my hand wide open in the middle
of the night. So the ER doc described,
to calm me down, how one time she had saved
a severed thumb, brought in swaddled in a towel.
I have been thinking ever since, now that I’m sober,
how the thumb woke up as if nothing at all
had happened, pale Lazarus bent over
and brought to full height. How the severed part would heal;
how the color would come back; but also how
the thumb would have been, like Lazarus, always a little
numbed after that, always off kilter a little.
The doc explained this—part in disgust, now
I realize—as she sewed the wound into a curse.
It still feels drunk, the way I move my fingers.