TH2000: Identifying Marks

Identifying Marks
Lisa Morin

My bleached tibia
lies solitary in a desert creekbed;
three steel screws wink in the sun
like ornaments.

Or they could dig me up
ten thousand years from now,
a resinous skeleton, a find;
let them give me a name
from a popular song
and catalogue me:
female, nullipara,
153 centimeters tall;
twenty-four teeth, nine filled
with crude amalgam;
one healed fracture of the left talus
and one of the left
tibial plateau, the latter
pinned with three (barbaric!) screws. Let them
assemble my bones in their museum,
draw their own conclusions.

III

Three
fire-tempered screws
rattle softly
at the bottom
of the box
of sparkling gray ash
my younger sister carries
to the end of the pier.