Sandra Kolankiewicz
Holidays with the Skeleton
There you are again, a bag of bones
cursing life when you starved yourself to
get here! All have deserted you but
your frame—and that not for long, just the
fragile skin holding you together
like a heart in wax paper. Decades
passed before you grew a root, but then
desiccation came upon you, left
all but the scaffold onto which we
hang our clothes, whether indebted to
you under the skin irrelevant.
The rooks or starlings argue in the
tree above the cat crossing the snow-
white yard in the dim light, sun rise at
7:46 this morning though
even now the air seems not to have
acknowledged the sky’s peaking like an
afterthought. We’ll slide into evening as
if slipping on the ice in our
tumblers, having left the Day of the
Dead behind, stumbled through Thanksgiving,
fallen face down before the manger.
After Your Extended Illness
After an extended illness, your
children begin to mature. The one
you never would have expected
behaves badly. The faces of your
beloveds come in closer, others as
remote as through glass,
archetypes or clichés walking
around in bacterial skins under
alkaline skies. Your body
becomes as soft and transitory as
butter, succumbing to temperature
or stiffening for no reason but the
weather. Your bones get in the
way. Of all your possessions,
your telephone is the most
important—after the garden, of
course, that you cannot own and
which may even possess you
because without daily effort it
disappears, the labor of someone
full of hope in a state of denial.
