The bone rested in her palm, possibly the answer
to mysteries she’d sought in dirt, the missing human link.
Did the released spirit of the dead somehow sense her?
The flint point was stuck in the bone she’d pulled from the sink
and seemed to say to her, I’m not the answer you seek.
Not a good death. Not a good battle. Not a good day.
But it wasn’t this bone she stared at that seemed to speak.
“Why the fuck am I here?” was the question on loop-play
in her head. Projectiles shatter bone. Love shatters hearts.
They’d had a battle. He’d left angry. Not a good death.
If I were a tree, she thought, there would be rings on parts
of me that remember you, to show which years were best
and which are the black, bleak hours without you in them.
Every bone she’d dug, all these years, remembered him.
