Forensics
Fetal and twisted
fear their gods and
there may be red
ochre among their
possessions. Arms
over arms of the pious,
and the multitudes
heaped like netted fish,
and the whole house,
the kings, and the fan-bearers
and the hunting dogs,
and the boats, and the rowers,
and his first wife, and his astronomer,
and his favorite horse in the ground
splinters with the weight
of an eleventh snowfall.
You tell me there is meaning
hidden in their best clothes.
Everyone in those days fell / to consumption,
and died indeterminate
of pathology.
When you examine me, years
from now post-mortem,
find the bone spur jutting
from my knee. Write “possible
limp;” and do not be precise
with more than measurement.
Do not weep
for my childless ischium.
Put numbers in
my name, do not imagine
a face where there is none.
“Forensics” originally appeared in The Iowa Review and has been reprinted here with permission of the author. It’s sister poem “Pathology” can be read here.
is a Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan, and is a descendant of the Oneida Tribe of Indians of Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in Drunken Boat, Sonora Review, The Iowa Review, SOFTBLOW, Apogee, Day One, and elsewhere. She is the managing editor of the .
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