No One Can Tell the Bones of the Dead from the Bones of the Living
       

Not the dove's, its slick underbelly
unfeathered in a wood. Not the winter

hares, their fur stripped like the exhaust
of a thousand planes strewn over fields

of ice. Not the diseased dog, gone
home to die on the carpet. Not

the depressive. Debridement of the brain: bride
from wedding dress. Electroshock

therapy still works, the doctors say. But the drowned
man enters a cadaver

room, lies down in place of his future
absence. He has never been less

sorry. Each day, his sadness is greater than any god
to stop it. Frustration is a family

unit, a disease undetectable except by sound:
a cry, a deadbolt turning, the doorknob

reversed so the lock is on the outside. Try
to lock any man inside a delusion, pale

as the horse harnessed to the field. Try to make
the skin a permanent home. Pain

comes & goes only if the brain registers pain.
In a family, one learns early to stay away

from windows. To stave the flies. That even
a horse gets spooked & runs

sometimes, the wind tearing through bone
like a child running for their life.

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Copyright © 2019 Chelsea Dingman All rights reserved
from The Greensboro Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission