Poetry
The Trilling Wire in the Bone
Dawn Lonsinger
The bone broken for luck, scraped
for meat, collected for construction,
gnawed on. The temple of bones.
Bones that finger the shape & texture of other things—
vellum, pudding, papyrus—only to find they, too, have bones:
strawberry bones, mirror bones, horse bones, slot
machine bones snapping back.
A deer-like shape turns its neck
and you can hear the tiny crystals
cracking like fish bones, the lyceum
weeping.
The big bones hold their breath.
The tiny bones ballast the void.
Turned over, culled, buried, dug up, desiccating
in the carbon-digging light. Ultraviolent rays.
Bones dislocated. Bones hollowed. Bones stained.
Bones archived, crushed to powder. The wind blooming
bone red. The singing bone.
The translucent bone bodies of the cicadas abandoned.
The alien borderlands: cartilage, tusks, horn, beak, hooves,
their unique hip structure, a bracelet of bright
hair about the bone.
A room fills with creatures drained of color,
yet alive, abominable & human, animal & protean, spun
out of the blanched bones of cotton candy. The edges
so fine that they feed the forms. Moving involuntary
and slight, bleeding dry movement.
Baby bones seafloor-spreading. The wonderful fish-like
economy of the lower back. The soft seashell bones of
the ear vibrating: malleus, incus, stapes. Bones sinking, sinking in.
Bones audible, frank, corrupted,
bones splintering in the platform,
in the crackle of the microphone:
the lecture bone.
Bone orchard. Bone box. Bone cellar where
beets gulp vinegar, where marrow pauses.
Bones in the bread, in the backyard, of the swing set.
My buttered, residential, bones,
sugar bones, damn bones, hip bones, crevasse.
Bones boiled in broth.
Bones reconfigured into tools, stegosauruses, jewelry.
Whale bones gathering the desert, the prayer of
the bone on the beach. Signature of bones.
Joint pins and hip replacements gravely gripping while
ligaments pull away from the scaffolding,
blood caulking the body, opening the amphitheater socket.
Bones licked with live tissue. Bones connected,
disconnected, wet. The moving, incoherent, bone.
Imposter bones. Electronic spine. Skull captions.
We were subjugated. We were alone.
And the bones began to bargain with the body,
vibrating first the heart.