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Valerie Loveland
Bone scan
I used to think a skeleton
key opened bones.
I am so vain
that I get portraits
taken of my skeleton.
My grandmother’s tired spine
bends me a warning.
Something vandalizes
her structure, chips away.
She hunches shorter
every six months.
I never broke a bone.
Does that imply
a well-built framework,
or expose my bookworm
tendencies, my timid
and fearful nature?
I want to talk
to the man who insulted
my bones, called
them weaklings. In the X-ray,
my skeleton smiles, robust
as a Halloween chatterbox.
Just because my pelvis
resembles a butterfly,
doesn’t mean it’s fragile.
It’s too heavy to fly.
Why worry about bones
when they survive longest
in the coffin?
My osteoporosis
is a myth—I will become
the best fossil one day.
Valerie Loveland is the author of
Reanimated, Somehow (Scrambler
Books, 2009). Her poetry appears in Best of the Web 2008 and on her website: valerieloveland.com
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