Requiem for My Skeleton

By Phyllis Klein

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I ask myself how to grieve for my bones 

I ask myself how to feel them thinning 

I ask myself why I don’t feel it 

I ask myself what I was looking for in the closet 

of my scaffolding  I ask why it was locked 

I ask to say a few words of remembrance 

for the framework   I ask to sit in a 

field of butterflies because they don’t live long    I ask 

to break out of this cage    I ask to think 

of bone broth    I  cry    I try matching outside 

to inside    I support myself   can I imagine myself stooped over 

I ask you to hold my hand as we watch 

a puff of clouds trek above our bodies and dissolve

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Phyllis Klein is a psychotherapist and poet in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently Sheila Na-Gig, Comstock Review, Mad Swirl, and The New Verse News. She has won several finalist awards. Her book, The Full Moon Herald, was a 2021 finalist in the Eric Hoffer awards. She hosts Poets in Conversation, a Zoom reading series started during the pandemic.

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