Poetry, d.h. lane
marrowbone
a yellow-brick road to a house with broken bones and serrated teeth
that tear apart its occupants
and devour them too.
i booked a flight to syracuse, new york, and the house grew legs to chase me.
though i never thought myself dumb, i could never tell being chased
away from being chased down. being sought after.
maybe that house needed me like i needed it. its brutality, nature versus nurture.
my bones fractured, infinite hairline scars and cigarette smoke. the home of it all. the memories in my marrow like mosquitos frozen in amber. rum and coke, ashes and orange skies. somebody else’s lip
balm in my mouth.
it didn’t go anywhere— there isn’t a place where that home resides on any plain, no coordinates on a winsome grid. i see it waking up in the morning, cold sweat all over my body and my
mother’s voice ringing in my ears.
my broken bones are her broken bones.
not the house’s fault. i see now that it was no more compliant in my trauma than a cutting floor to
the hand holding the knife.
but when i sink to the floor, i still see blood. i still wish i was eaten more than
halfway. that i wasn’t hunting down lost limbs of mine, fishhooked on phantom pains.
i take my body with me and become the stray wolf in the night desperate to find a path to
its pack.
to find someone, anyone that knows what to do with all these fucking bones.
wild thing unfit for all this
more than i’d like to admit i feel my existence was not meant to be lived out as human. the incorrigible sense of beastliness and unreality— are we really confining ourselves to walking around like our heart is not a beating animal wanting to be free of the rib cage? in no sense were we born to work toward a hunt that feeds no one; we were born to
run.
prometheus brought us fire and we punished him. everyday we innovate and punish the planet for being our home. burning down houses is the new lighting candles. does this feel like home? does your body welcome you inside it? do you look at the moon and want to scream sometimes? other people look at me like they see something i don’t. my deer antlers? my lopsided fangs, growing in, thirsty for a taste from another planet? i don’t want to be here in this world. i was never mighty enough to be human. the animal of my body wants to sink its teeth in deep.
if i am delusional i am
shooting a car into space.
is that the prometheus you want for this world?
we need to retreat into our animality more. can we love each other a little? maybe if we walked around with our hearts on the outside we’d finally see that the other man is man too, the enemy is man, too. i didn’t know there were wrong ways to be wild until i was a teenager and i watched people become prey. i read about men becoming carcasses and women becoming scattered parts. i am older now and watching pure animal bodies become legislation, watching elephants robbed of their tusks. if you are rich i think you a fool. what animal leaves fresh kill sitting around for the look of it? you animals ought to be cast out of your pack. the wild would deem you useless. it’s not immature to be greatly unsatisfied by the world as we see it— i see a red flag in the content. where are your eyes? old gods died under metal hands. old languages died under louder voices. we are unlearning how to evolve and be killed by our own inventions. we are an endangered species turning on itself. a betrayal; a laughable end. humanity is satire. you cannot up your ratings by robbing the audience of their teeth. before it’s too late, we need to
run.
the modern day makes me ill with indigestion. can we be wild enough for the grass to turn green again? for foreign tongues to come back from the dead? it is dawn on a new day and prometheus is still in his immortal agony. we don’t need to live in agony, all we need to do is
run from this
find purpose in fleshy matters, in undergrow. in the rapidly beating heart and birdsong. stop killing our own species. wild things can be kind. can’t we be kind
or have we lost that as well?
d. h. lane is a Creative Writing and Linguistics undergrad at Syracuse University. She focuses on classic civilizations, language, queer identity, the horror genre, and deer in the headlights. You can find her works in The Graveyard Zine, Anti-Heroin Chic, dog teeth, Outlander, and warning lines. She also edits for Renaissance Review and The Dawn Review, while also running her substack at https://delightfullyunhinged.substack.com.