Laura Page
Hospice of Bones
Can we say it’s kind
the way endings sometimes gentle us in, entropy
sympathetic to our thresholds? The way our
bones so often talk us down?
Here, the smoke pixelates us.
We notice how things have turned a little
yellow, like the eyes of a sad, beautiful inebriate.
Itinerant lakes are looking for lake beds,
bloating and scarring in increments, like a long-suffering
liver patient. You pour another. We stay
indoors and draw unlikely comfort
from the fact of our scaffolding, contained.
Here, the smoke almost lifts us
as we try to fathom how it must feel
to line a Sterilite bin with blankets
and ferry one’s infant down an interstate highway,
consider that each year, cyclones levy more of the angry
white heads swirling across this marble,
each year, there is less wizened growth
to miss the forest by, and how our bones
don’t miss a thing despaired,
aren’t fazed even by the sun looking vagrant
through this low-res carbon filter—
even by their own porosity.
Laura Page is the author of Children, Apostates (dgp, 2016), Sylvia Plath in the Major Arcana (Anchor & Plume, forthcoming), and epithalamium (forthcoming), chosen by Darren C. Demaree as the winner of the Sundress Publications 2017 chapbook competition. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rust + Moth, Crab Creek Review, The Fanzine, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Red Paint Hill, The Rumpus, Unbroken, Maudlin House, TINGE, and elsewhere. Page is a graduate of Southern Oregon University and editor of Virga Magazine.
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