Dorsal Atlas of Your Lover’s Absent Vertebrae

Erin Kae

It’s fact, not romance—
a backbone gaping as jack-o-lantern
mouth. Peel back the old, shining scar. Find
the gaps weightless, immune
to gravity. Tiny cities floating where solid spine
should be. Look closer. Each its own milky galaxy,
separate & bookended by bone. Each star
a window, a world of other worlds. Tuck your smallest
finger into the gaps. They are warm & breathless
—ferrying through vacuum
sea of needles, an endless orbit. Impact your lips
to the spaces, whisper your tongue
into craters: Any words
are lost or swept away with tidal force.

Count time in hospital beds, bury
your head in sands of days
passing—heaviness settling in
—over eyelids,            over schoolwork,
over friends who said they’d visit.
Your mind becomes a rolodex, reinvents
the periodic table. You re-write the elements:
paper, glass, transparent syringes, ceiling tiles,
collection of x-rays. These are the blocks
that re-build you, bring shine back
to your marrow. Let the shadows pass
over instead of sealing your gaping cracks.

& is this where it matters most? The metal
spilled,            hammered,      planted
across the holes leaves no breath of air, keeps the rest
of the bones from crumbling. The new rods
break underwater, knock the breath out
of this solar system. How far away
from meeting—how far away from never
meeting at all, as heart rate flat lines
for a moment   —two  —infinite
breathless memoriam. Imagine that moment
every time you swim from then on.
The metal undercutting his boyhood—his buoyancy
—makes you tread harder knowing
he can no longer float.

where in death would his bones have gone   fused
at this part   suffocating
instead   pressure building   rocket ship
trapped   melts into lunar floor

where the contrail ends
(what’s at the end of propelled
explosion): mostly-immobile launch pad.
Vapor settles into moon dust
debris, smoothing lunar maria—shaded,
not forgotten—buried deep in the
rubble. Whole, for once, unmanned.

© 2019 Erin Kae

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Born and raised outside of Rochester, New York, Erin Kae is a proud graduate of SUNY Geneseo. Her poetry has been featured in Vinyl, Sonora Review, Crab Fat Magazine, and Fugue, among others. She was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Aster(ix) Journal and was selected as a finalist for the 2017 Locked Horn Press Publication Prize for their issue Read: Water An Anthology, 2019. Her first poetry chapbook, Grasp This Salt, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2019. She currently resides in Somerville, Massachusetts.