• Skip to content
  • Skip to secondary navigation
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Painted Bride Quarterly

  • About
    • About PBQ
    • People
  • Issues
    • Current Issue
    • Past Issues
    • Print Annuals
  • Podcast
    • Latest Podcast
    • All Podcasts
  • News & Events
  • Submit
  • Shop
  • Fiction
  • Poetry
  • Prose
  • Contributors
  • Current Issue

Mary Luttrell: Porous

April 17, 2013 by PBQ

He offers her three bones as a form of compensation
laying the nesting bird of her palm
warm against his sternum’s slope,
bones of sugar, bones of soap,
so close to the flutter of shame at his throat
this handful of her small hot bones
to have, or keep, or hold –
mineralized love, shot through with reeds
of velvet marrow, tinted mulberry.

Astonishment sculpts the curve
of his mandible, whets the cant of his ribs
and goes humming like a fuse down knobs
of vertebrae, sparking a trail of sulfurous tang.
This is how the bones begin to know
themselves, as kindling that ignites
the will, then falls away in a hush
to the wet black earth, again and again.

Filed Under: Contributors 86, Issue 86, Poetry, Poetry 86 Tagged With: Contributors 86, Mary Luttrell, Poetry, Poetry 86

Reader Interactions

Primary Sidebar

Recent News & Events

PBQ @ AWP!

PBQ Poet’s Publishing Premier: Carlos Andrés Gómez’s Fractures

Issue 100 Has Arrived!

Temporarily Closing Submissions

PBQ presents: Slam Bam Reboot

© 2020 Painted Bride Quarterly. Contact PBQ: info@pbqmag.org