The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Gastromythology by Jessica Manack

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The House I Built Didn’t Have a Roof Until I Shouted Your Name

How small’s the sound of colossal things breaking: a rattling. A rug
shaken out. Snow falling like bone dust. Pulverized cloud. Cheeky
bones, lazy bones, funny bones: gone hollow. Blanched marrow.

I had memorized each of your parts, could have filed them in plastic
pouches like the archaeologist whisking her soft brush over femurs
and teeth. Each piece in its place, and no room for nostalgia. But for
you, pursuit was the pleasure, possession passé.

When you die, you’d reminded me, you want to be made into plates.
Bone china. Nobody will dig you up in 2,000 years, speculate, measure
hips, count teeth. Embarrassing, that would be, to be so scrutinized,
like seeing the gynecologist at the grocery.

Awkward, like talking to the grizzled man two houses down, the man
who whittles and, if asked why, says, “Some things are more beautiful
broken,” the secret of bone-setters, of geodes, of the spines of books.

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