Glass Poetry Press

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Volume Two Issue Two

Jennifer Mooney

After his death

In those mornings, when my brothers and I would sit, creaky with too much sleep, to breakfast, our Mother would lift the knife with mud encrusted fingers and butter every slice so we could taste the cold zinc of bone. In those mornings, she would gnaw on one and leave it long and white at the centre of our table, before returning to the dig. I used to think she would lay down less comfortably in the memory of bones but in those mornings, she could sleep for hours in the memory of his femur and scour, hour under hour, their soundless bed for his deaf mouth. There was no cardiac arrest when her heart failed, Only darkening ribs, building round a jail.