Laurie Macfee currently lives and writes in Vermont, and works at the Vermont Studio Center. She received her MFA Creative Writing in poetry from Sierra Nevada College in 2015. She is a guest poetry co-editor at Green Mountains Review and a past poetry editor of the Sierra Nevada Review. Her publications include Forklift, Ohio; Big Bell; Brushfire; and the anthology Change in the American West.
Bone Music
If you’re the man I think you are
we’ll press our ashes in vinyl.
Make bone music, sound labyrinths
etched like ribs around transparent lungs,
manicured by scissors used for cutting
cuticles to the quick. Central burn
a slow cigarette after the scratched rhythm
of blues in a hidden kitchen bubbling
with vodka, stew, your skeleton a bootleg:
metatarsals, scapula and clavicle,
sacrum nestled to a beat boy thrum.
I’ll stand on your feet as we dance
in the library. No police to forbid
an Underwood, Royals free to miter and clack
under phalanges blown pinwheel
and sideways. One couch. Two lamps,
pound cats, a mutt with brown eyes,
the golden dog walked daily. Journey’s End.
If you’re the man, I’ll trace uncensored circles
on your back, dissident x-rays.
You’ll take illegal notes, vowels howling,
our tongues a record, another tattoo.
My coat. Your mandible. Song.