The Ulna

by

Rebecca Reynolds

 

Prismatic in form. The bone diminishes
from above, its lower extremity excluded from the wrist
by articular dusk.
The night moves in, and no light fractures
into rainbow hummingbirds above the chairs. It is
so lightless in here, though there is no correlative for so –
there is the close and lustless pivoting of elbow
in itself
in the semilunar notch
for what was I ambitious? For everything and yet so
afraid, I could not apply myself
I could not move outside my bones
where the tongue touches the velvet palate
immersed in flesh, my forearm – my writing arm --
subdivided by a longitudinal ridge, and the bone across
from bone, the radius
filled with negative space, almost a hollow
you would slip
into, touching the pillars with a lunar
word inside and a round
woman rooting in curves, a trespasser
who echoes my every line; Paracelsus, himself
an afterthought, first theorized the homunculus
for which there is no female form—for the little man lived inside
the female, disguised in sperm. O little man
who are not man at all—let us say you have lived nowhere
and yet we talk, you and I, and she.

 


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