Bone Depot by Sandi Leibowitz
Mishearing a mortgage company’s name,
I picture a charnel house, bones for sale or rent:
plastic packages of phalanges
swinging from their hooks,
rows of radii brightly polished,
femurs, ulnas, clavicles,
the top shelves lined with skulls
sporting baseball caps, top hats, sun bonnets,
their eye sockets displaying bouquets of colored pencils,
their jaws crunching down on walnuts.
The animal kingdom’s organized
according to size, from mouse atomies
suitable for earrings,
to the monumental skeletons of elephants.
An aisle of enamel boxes and ceramic jars
cradle the cremains of beloved pets,
handfuls of ashes to blow onto a lake
for making wishes on or plant deep
in the soil to nourish beds of bulbs.
What might I build from these raw materials?
Perhaps borrow the leg bones of a horse
so I could surf the wild-grass sea,
lose my timidity, find my inner centaur.
From the humeri and metacarpals of condors
I could construct wings
on which I’d cross the East River currents,
sail the winds of Wall Street,
to arrive at cloud country above Atlantic swells
or head west to dip low in some field,
become the angel of milkweed and cornflowers.
Or I’d fashion from a whale’s rib cage
the frame of a house, entering
its arched doorway each day
as if it were a cathedral devoted
to arduous saints and compassionate deities,
design for myself there a life
sharp as candle-flame,
brilliant as angelfish
or the gemmed panes of stained glass,
clean as bone.
Sandi Leibowitz, author of THE BONE-COLLECTOR, EURYDICE SINGS, and the recently-published GHOST-LIGHT, a quarantine journal in verse, lives in New York City with two ghost-dogs and the occasional dragon. Her speculative fiction and poetry has garnered second- and third-place Dwarf Stars, as well as nominations for the Elgin, Rhysling, Pushcart Prize, and Best of the Net awards. Her work appears in Red Eft Review, Alien Buddha Press Gets Rejected, Verse-Virtual, Newtown Literary, Frost Meadow Review, Corvid Queen, Uncanny, Liminality, and other magazines and anthologies.