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.