Comfort

You unhook your ribcage from the morning rays,

hoist them on a platter and walk them home.

Edge the mounted globe with your forefingers, 

mottled with sunlight more than blood

and struggle with the screen door as you call my name.

You tell me

Do the same for yourself one day. 

Show me that you can do it, grow up!

You say I am simply you but a version more rare.

We meet Dad in the kitchen by the chopping board.

He rocks the butcher’s knife like a toy boat,

but he is a lost sailor 

kissing each bladed corner into the dampened wood.

A day-dreaming sway. 

The father’s hand rocks to balance an unforgiving tide.

You take your ribs, your globe with an interrupted orbit 

and set it down in front of him as the family marvels.

The game is truly beautiful.

Dad clutches a bone,

wraps his wide, letterless fingerprints 

around its scarlet flesh,

consoles the marble how you do with my veins

when you see a little bit of you running.

He rams it with the sharpened edge thinner than, 

you joke, 

the film roll from your wedding night. 

The ribcage is now pieced

as if a man looked too hard for an opening.

Let them make a meal out of where a heart once grew.

He pries the last chunk off, but the butt of the knife slips

onto a stone-slab made to carry only thuds.

He wipes off the juice,

the same that always comes from things 

that can only wish for more orbits.

I take the smaller pieces, his anchors, land them into a bowl.

We grace it with seasoning, or what we can call now, a season.

I massage it because it is your bone.

I assign meat its aging spots. 

And now that we’ve dealt with an orbit by breaking it,

we have two options.

We can take it outside again.

Let it nap in the bark vest we borrowed from our tree.

Line the blocks in an array 

like we assign how each part of a skeleton rests.

Let the flames make ash under it, 

though the meat is not fazed from its rows

when it dies.

Smoke is now what chases a house and waits for it to burn. 

Let the smoke chase the house still held by your ligaments.

Let the smoke find a place to stay.

We smoke out an animal like silent hunters,

harness it onto our mantels and tapestries,

into our ears,

out of our mouths.

Or instead,

we choose not to burn.

Rub salt into muscles that don’t realize they’re cold.

Wait for it to dry.

As we wait, the bark still leans against the tree it used to hug, 

calling itself useless. 

From it its resin,

lost collagen turned ornaments.

When the meat is raw it’s a girl untouched 

and when it’s  

cured

it becomes yet another uncooked meal for a home.

Maybe we can take the tendons and wear them like jewelry, 

then eat what makes us jewel-like.

Leave ourselves alone to age.

Our skin infused by wrinkles, barricades.

Our expressions submerged into each socket 

that follows a bone put into place.

Wait for however longer a complexion can hold space,

shrivel up grown-up conversations 

about how we all talk like our parents,

roll out our tongues like cadavers

on the American tabletop.

I wait to be served another catastrophe 

like the blackening of bark with a desperate family name.