excerpt from VOLTI SUBITO CANTABILE MORENDO
Prathna Lor

I remember the graveyard as a lumberyard more than anything else. We walked beyond the smell of death, our feet unable to distinguish the stench of bone and leaf; bark and flesh. All congruent between our toes, stuck behind the folds in our feet.

*

We harvested bone in the same disrespectful way lumbermen did trees. A tombstone cut down. A casket extracted. The skeleton a rotting prize. We carried the bones in urns strapped upon our backs. A truck is noisy, disruptive, and clumsy.

*

This is our house of bone. Smell our history in the carpets. A human skeleton replaces the absence of lumber. It bleeds the same stale air. It still cracks like wood in the cold. It still bends and warps, beyond shape.

*

The mother purees the head of a dolphin. Pours it into the thinning tube. Pats her son on the head, delicately -- it is the only part of him that still clings on to skin. She will listen to him play his own body. She is uncomfortable, wants to do the dishes. Believes it is the same as watching her son masturbate to a holy image, a holy place. An icon.ĘSave us, she thinks. On a grocery receipt she has a hypothetical equation for how much skin her son used to have. She thinks about his skin, floating in the air.

1996 © 2008