Mouse Bones, Too – Theodore Worozbyt

One might expect a very small house
to be made of them. It isn’t so.
It’s time to confess, and I will.
Tomato skeletons hiss with
scarlet caviar, likewise
delicately crisp mouse bones,
especially the toes, not
the teeth, as one might
imagine. Incarnadine
shadows play over lairs
where toads have no need 
to pretend such bones do not
occupy the fen’s sense of smell.
Turtles, too, know
it’s mouse bones 
all the way down, or
until the soles of one’s 
golden shoes crumble into
mold, and the ways to put
them on is, then, forgotten
and the subsequent gelatinous 
intricacies seem to dissolve,
plangent as an afternoon wearing
itself thin. So surmised itself 
a vacuum sucking white
apple hair and the lint roller still
finding black hairs I can’t see
seeming to suggest
what I meant
wasn’t even death
after all.

Theodore Worozbyt is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama and Georgia Arts Councils. His books are The Dauber Wings, Letters of Transit, and Smaller Than Death.