Crane Girl Cleans Her Own Skeleton

By Amy Jarvis

in the last epoch I could have been

the girl underwater, the one who drowned

when she decided her lungs could not longer

keep her afloat. if we follow the science right

down to the quick, we learn that life cannot

sustain in an environment that doesn’t

provide enough to survive. On my worse days,

I’ll decide that sustenance is the word love spilling

backwards out of my own mouth. I cannot use its

buoyancy to build me a float, I cannot categorize my

death as an accident when I stopped feeding

this body the wings it needed to stay. In another

lifetime, this could be translated into giving up, but here

it’s about the exquisiteness of my own corpse, sitting

in the middle of my own skeleton & pulling stars out

of my bone marrow. I want to be a swan & stay here

forever, forget how to fly south & revel in the cold. If

I existed 60 years back, I’d get sent to a sanitarium &

injected with something immobilizing, but I

decided to stay here forever by my own damn self. If

I ever birth someone else out of this broken body begging

to stop breaking, I’ll tell them when I die I am to be

burned & scattered at the lake that gave me life. I have done

enough rotting in my own lifetime, enough anthropomorphizing

my blankets into cocoons.