How many rooms full of bones does it take to impress you?

Poem by Brian Sheffield

A cellar door opens to invite you, my love, 

but where is your smile? 

There is a closet here. A hangar. An airplane’s

bathroom. There are bones here that are received as

prizes. 

My kitchen smells of bone broth. 

My backyard hides the femur of a gopher 

I have wanted to kill. 

Where was it again that your fingers buried themselves?

And have they begun to sprout yet? 

I walked through the catacombs of Rome 

where monks, hiding themselves for love of you, 

spent their time contemplating the habits of their skeletal brothers. 

(I still remember one who was snarling 

through the tattered leather of his face) 

Let the amputated laughter sing from behind the hearse. 

If you, my love, are an arbitrary marker of time 

then what growths still grimace from behind your lungs? 

And what white thing peeks through the laceration looking to escape? 

Brian Sheffield is a performance poet based out of the Central Coast of California. He is an editor with Boukra Press out of Monterey. He is also co-founder of Mad Gleam Press and POST(blank), a bilingual, French-American Word Art Journal.