Ina Roy-Faderman
someone told me today that i got lucky
your bones crumble
tiny stellates hung from
threads of memory
spicules of pain
concentrate in the heart
catching on fibers
hanging next to desiccated
words “you got lucky”
the blue-scrubbed nurse
i still hear the twenty years
gone in each
beat absent of you
and the stains that
i cannot wash even if
i wished to but
they hold the
shadow lingers in
corners of the bedroom
still with blade thin bones
hands spread as tense as
starfish and then relaxed
flying upwards to the last
night
Ina Roy-Faderman (inafelltoearth.com) teaches college and graduate biomedical ethics and is an associate fiction editor for Rivet Journal and librarian for a school for gifted children. Her poetry, fiction, interviews, and literary analyses have appeared in The Rumpus, Inscape, Midwestern Studies in Philosophy, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Poems in the Aftermath: An Anthology from the 2016 Presidential Transition Period (Indolent Books, 2018), edited by Michael Broder.