No One Sees the Bones

Photo by Kat Kelley on Unsplash

but they are there. They are rotted down,
dried up, in some places, ground. They are
in the soil, beneath the shop that sells
ceramics and gold-plated trinkets. The bones
of loved ones, neighbors, elders, matriarchs,
martyrs. These are the bones I mourn.
No one sees the calcium deposits
but the rose garden, the compost bin. When
the weather gets wetter, the soil
turns itself over to reveal a soft white
speck. No one sees the bones but
they see mineral, debris, detritus. It’s easy
to squint and think of it all as trash, the lost,
tough organs of the lives that lived
here before you. No one sees the bones
because they are old, relics from a different era:
ossification predating road rage, drive-thrus,
the Hollywood sign. No one wants to be close
to anything old, always preferring the scallop
of silver that can fill in for a crescent-
shaped whatever, even the waning moon.
I didn’t want my osteo-cored memories, but I felt
a pull to get my hands dirty, slip some piece
of my flesh into the earth as an offering,
a reminder that I am an old bone too.
I have my curves, tissues, crannies.
A dent in my shin from falling down, a rounding
on my skull because I think too much.
These pieces of me are broken without
being fractured, they are the tools of body
that can be of service, my frizzy hair
a stretchy fiber for a hummingbird making
her nest. I could do what you do, I could
seek some other end for my bones
that doesn’t leave them to become waste,
degrading under the freeway overpass—but
that would be entitled abandonment, pure
and simple. I would be culpable, guilty
as charged, treating my bones as somehow
better than those before them, as somehow
more worthy. I cannot give myself amenity
greater than that of a daisy. I am with them,
the old, forgotten, the tortured and removed,
the entire displaced city. My bones
are theirs too. Dust to dust, dirt to dirt.
Trabecular, marrow, cells, I atone.
I will not dissolve alone.