HURT BONE
When I tell the story of your return,
you are the supplicant and I
the forgiving queen. But in that year
before you blew back into my life
like a late spring snow—beautiful
and wrong and something I wasn’t sure
I still wanted to want—I had already
spent months pacing my small scrap
of floor trying to figure out if
I deserved to be loved. We both know
you gave my life back to me. Now
our daughter cuts open the neck
of the toy dinosaur with her doctor
scissors to see the hurt bone inside,
and when she finds it, she wipes
the pain away with the purple sock
that lost its mate in the laundry bin
last week. I tell our story with a laugh,
over a glass of wine—with the kind
of casual tilt to the head that belies
how much it pained us both—
then wipe the corner of my mouth
with a cocktail napkin. Everything
some kind of invisible loneliness
we dab at with a rag we didn’t
realize we’d kept just for that purpose.
—from Rattle #86, Winter 2024
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Keetje Kuipers: “Sometimes a poem arrives in my mind quickly and nearly fully formed. That can be exciting, but it’s not necessarily as rewarding as those other times when a poem—like this one—has taken me years of quilting together saved images, actions, and moments before I arrive at a kind of shared meaning. Reading it now reminds me of the labor it takes not only to make a poem I love, but to make a life I love, too.” (web)
