Page 32 - WTP Vol. VIII #3

moniCa roWley
Bone Science
Soon I’ll have the dead in my mouth holding my teeth in place,
dental records the detectives might need to check if I were to die an unspeakable death.
I think about this cadaver bone in my jaw: What parts of a whole
did it lie in when it belonged to the living? Was the body of its residence
a crook? A scribe? A ballerina?
Was its holder happy with his health?
Or did the woman-skeleton of this bone cheat, in flesh, on her wife?
Will I change ever so slightly after it’s grafted? Maybe
my atheist friends have it right: dead when dead. No transmigration
of another sewn into common diseased gums by the periodontist good at her science,
using the dead’s parts to keep me whole.
As I tongue the new stitches, glibly calling on my own Yorick, I think with hesitancy
this corpse bone is important—
the implanted evidence illuminated in the x-ray
of my skull. I decide I must add this small bit of the dead to my soul.
25
Rowley teaches high school in Brooklyn, NY. Her poetry has appeared in the Irish literary journal The Ogham Stone; The Bread Loaf Journal; Yes, Poetry (online); and is forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic. She is the recipient of a National Endow- ment for the Humanities Grant and the Roxanne McCormick Leighton Fellowship for study at Bread Loaf.