Requiem for My Skeleton

I ask myself how to grieve for my bones

I ask myself how to feel them thinning

I ask myself why I don’t feel it

I ask myself what I was looking for in the closet

of my scaffolding I ask why it was locked

I ask to say a few words of remembrance

for the framework I ask to sit in a

field of butterflies because they don’t live long I ask

to break out of this cage I ask to think

of bone broth I cry I try matching outside

to inside I support myself can I imagine myself stooped over

I ask you to hold my hand as we watch

a puff of clouds trek above our bodies and dissolve

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Phyllis Klein is a psychotherapist and poet in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently Sheila Na-Gig, Comstock Review, Mad Swirl, and The New Verse News. She has won several finalist awards. Her book, The Full Moon Herald, was a 2021 finalist in the Eric Hoffer awards. She hosts Poets in Conversation, a Zoom reading series started during the pandemic.