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Rendering the Bones


The trouble with grief,
I think as I boil the bones,
is that you grow accustomed to it.
Empty space, where all you have left
is old dry bones.

At the resthome where my father lives,
his neighbors pedal their wheeled chairs like
little boats along the halls, their eyes empty
as hooked fish. These old ones know
dry bones don’t live.

Against her shriveled breast,
an old woman clutches her plastic doll,
touches its cheek and croons to it.
Her reedy cry follows me down
the narrow hallways of our loss

where I hear her again,
as I stand at my stove,
clutching my mother’s spoon
in my hands,
rendering the bones.

Susan Lefler

published in Wind #94, 2005