Sacred Bones, by Courtney Edwards

The Burning Giraffe, by Salvador Dali (Spain) 1937

Sacred Bones
  
The body keeps scores of secrets, stored in my chest of little drawers and pulled like a strung muscle at inconvenient minutes. In a past life I must have been a witch, considering I am defeated by lukewarm shower water. This is the burning of a woman wandering the desert, ready to set the Sahara in flames if only to find a fluid ounce of truth, a drop of relief. This pain peels back my crust, reveals what swirls blue and what bleeds sinew. I know my past is spilling sentences of heroic women, but I am too far veiled in the future to know them. I never met my grandmother, only read about her in the newspaper, how she knew her way with a pillow and poisoned clam chowder. My mother loved me until I grew into my own legs, developed an allergy to arsenic. In this life, women are sacred bones scaffolded by someone else’s crutches, and we are too tired to release them. We rise in dreams, count hope by the hairs on our crown. A lightning storm rages in my soles and fingertips, which I want to uproot and interrogate: where did you begin, and when will you let me be at sea? 

Courtney Edwards

Courtney Edwards is an English teacher and photographer from Portland, OR. Her work has been published by The West Trade Review, Pile Press, The New Zealand Poetry Society, Sonora Review, Suspended Magazine, and Wild Roof Journal. Courtney enjoys traveling, exploring the PNW with her husband and three children, playing the piano, and helping to bring sea otters back to Oregon through the Elakha Alliance. You can connect with her on Instagram at @pnw.courtney