The Bonesetter's Daughter

It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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She dreams of comfrey and burdock,
feels through skin and spasmed muscles,
waits for marrow to hit the heart.

Pulls the stalks that serve for splints,
boils the tea that lays down bone,
mixes in ground egg- and oyster-shells.

They come for her father,
but after the crack, the scream,
he leaves the mending to her.

They give him a chicken, a hare,
or a passed-down brooch,
their gratitude mixed with suspicion.

To her he leaves the slow accretion
of the months, the strength
of calluses, the ache of rain.

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Jan Steckel’s fiction collection, Ghosts and Oceans, came out from Zeitgeist Press in 2023. Her poetry book, The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011), won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Like Flesh Covers Bone (Zeitgeist Press, 2018) won two Rainbow Awards for poetry. Her chapbooks Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her writing has appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, Canary, Assaracus, and elsewhere.