Hot breath creaks inside my chest, groans my slats with pearly condensation. I am twenty – and I am warped, with a body bent like shanty shingle, angled mad enough to slide off sides and tumble into flower beds of strangers.
My bones – once new, once green – grew children ‘long a doorframe, climbing swirls of ivy ink and wispy curls to lintel. Wily little imps they were that tore their jeans and shed their sleeves each fall, that slept in mud and came inside if just to smudge their mother’s ivory trinkets. Shelf dwellers in a dusty sea, elephant and whale – bone more bone than my own ever dared, or cared, to be.