Could you change these heavy ones for hollow bones?
You wonder at night when the 
wolves come. You would bash out the marrows from the tibula and fibula, lay 
the rich femur open for the licking. 
Wrap handfuls of sagging sinew, 
dig for withered muscles of calves
how you once dug clams from the damp salt sand. 

Then knead, you would pummel back to bread-dough elastic,
you would crouch,
and flex, you would spring. Leaping out and up spreadeagled,
a throwing star, or a frail-spined cartwheel,
spun across the face of the fleshless moon.  

Where do we truly go when we die?
Here lies the puff-disturbed exoskeleton, long abandoned by the cunning spider. 
Shin bones delicate as eyelashes 
collapse in on themselves. 

You say scraping enough to keep body 
and soul together is more than you’re worth. 
Being gnawed through nightly. Daily bitten at, pawed 
over, as so many odds and ends
left behind, an old lady’s estate sale. Her empty blouses
flowered, slack-shouldered; the concave yawn of patent leather; 
handfuls of lavender crumbled in pouches.
China boxes, the ones where she kept 
the children’s baby teeth
painted pink, and blue and springtime green. 

In the end, that’s all that remains. 

You

memories of skin

what’s left aimed skyward, shedding

Teeth, and bones like jet trails.