My bones have beautiful remains
already cut, it’s true
already
mended together
as they bravely remain.
They hold
my flesh and skin on.
I bring their troop along
and bring myself along with it
(old impression: being only partly part of it)
to museums, before the glass of prehistoric displays
where, among the supposedly sharpened stones, arrowheads,
are femurs, visibly broken
but pieced back together.
Which just goes to show, in ten thousand and some-odd years,
my dear bones now on the asphalt, you can appear
in exhibitions mounted after a loco labor
near beer bottles and submachine guns,
this old rack
in my life
that has wracked me.
“Mes os,” © Marie-Claire Bancquart. Originally published in Avec la mort, quarter d’orange entre les dents, Obsidiane, 2005. Translation © Christina N. Cook, 2014. All rights reserved.
