Ex. Ossibus
(originally published in the Absinthe Literary Review)
Centuries after I die,
my skeleton will be dug up and
displayed in a museum,
the most beautiful bones
in the world — how their perfect
forms will inspire the sensitive,
the artistic, the overwrought —
though while I lived
you couldn’t tell from outside
how much beauty lay within.
My bones will be stored
in reliquaries made of silver, gold
and rock crystal, starburst shaped,
laid carefully inside glass cases
on gray velvet. I will be placed
next to a 16th-century illuminated
treatise on falconry,
down the hall from a pearwood gittern,
once stroked by Elizabeth the First.
Only the devout, the reverent,
will be allowed to dust me.
Young girls and boys
will be driven mad by my perfection.
Kimberly Townsend Palmer 