Excavation

Grace Lytle

My mother stares me down, searching for places where my skin sheers like light through sheets and the bone shines through.

I sometimes feel as though I am coming apart.

My stomach dips until I am able to hold my hipbones in my hands, hold them up to lamplight like artifacts.

Goodbye stillness, extras. This is just to say I’ve filled myself with daffodils and clovers and things that don’t stick down where you’ve placed them.

This is just to say I’m swallowing air until I am a vacuum.

What my mother doesn’t know won’t hurt her. I leave her bits of myself paper-trailed down the hall on nightly trips from bedroom to bathroom to bedroom again. I’d give up my body if it meant she could never put the pieces together.

I don’t often return to the body – not in a way that means anything other than a finger over the thump under my jaw.

A thumb in the divot behind my clavicle. I don’t come back to my own bones often enough to know how heavy they would be in my hands.