[Issue 2024.68]

‘Bone Planet’, Petra Kuppers

Art © 2024 Toeken

In the grey-green shelter of living bone, you grow ragged,
edges blood-less, crusted. Leucocytes eat this brown lump
and lunar rocks limn the pitted bowl, all semiarid surfaces
torn by meteor strikes, hammers fallen from afar, to pulp, dent,
abrade and pierce all smoothness. Motion sticks, ratchets
like a robot through its piston’s circumference, a click through
facets, like a sonar to decrepit whales, to long dead starships,
to aliens that flew with ease and beauty where I hitch,
my leg stuck straight, or crooked in its hip angle, a knee
devastation, on a grey planet whose gravity bears so deep,
so harsh into tender redness, debris pink and swollen, bursting
forth between the bone plates that creep in sticky abundance.
I try this the sand of ages, the sand in the machine:
look for that first step, routine for you, so big for me: to fly.

© 2024 Petra Kuppers

[Issue 2024.68]

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