First reject death as petty.
Second, find a university to decompose
the body, and a cargo hold to transport it.
Be patient. Going from flesh,
nails, hair, scars to
a good clean skeleton
takes about eighteen months.
Between death and skeleton,
the body becomes remains –
plural, multiple ways of teaching
the forensics students to study the dead.
Third, grad students scrub
the bones with toothbrushes.
For a fee, the Smithsonian will
rearticulate the bones.
Finally, the last roadtrip.
Son and skeleton father cruise
in the carpool lane to the father’s
old high school. The biology teacher
anticipates replacing her old human
skeleton, doesn’t know who these bones were.
–
Inspired by “Dem Bones,” Lizzie Widdicombe, The New Yorker, April 10, 2017
Katherine Anderson Howell attends the Aveda Institute in Washington, DC, where she also lives and raises two boys. She is a 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work can be found in Stillwater Review, Misfit Magazine, Burnt Pine, and Mojave Heart Review, among others.