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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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