Chicken Bones

By Naomi Ayala

Chicken Bones, I can hear your skeleton weeping

like it was five a.m. and hailing.

Your procession of clickety-clocks now

a flatbed leaping into potholes.

I am not a scarecrow heart.

You can feed off my shadow

where there’s music.

Boogey down Spanish Avenue, Anywhere, USA

so bold and beautiful like you used to.

Your mobile of spite words

twirling in that wild wind tease that lifts

above the New York skyline

above today’s cumulus.

Pedro never knew where the news was at

but today he says he saw you

leaving my house for the station

like you weren’t ever coming back.

I said you were visiting

with all the skinny folk in the world down south

a special sancocho recipe from Loasa witchu

for the infamously weak of bones.

Mami, she don’t say you’re nasty anymore

on account you ain’t around to talk like you used to

but, it’s ungodly, she says, gripping

her wild Puerto Rican heart, ungodly

those sounds he used to make like every

body-seeking spirit haunting your bedside cross

on All Soul’s Day.

The trouble with my folks is they think

because there ain’t so much of you to look at now

you ain’t really around when you are.

When you really gone, we don’t feel you here

it’s worse, Bones

like a clap out of time.

Yesterday, I told cousin Kiko

you showed up outta nowhere

and I took you dancing and you danced

like the island had been declared free or something

like there was enough rice and beans for the whole

Northeast corridor poor of this country.

Don’t care he says I lied.

Don’t care I don’t know where you are.

Don’t care you promised to write and didn’t.

I can hear your skeleton weeping

your clickety-clock bones

and know you must be dancing.

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