A woman, filled with the gladness of living,
put the purse of her body on the table
and began to unpack it.

“I have no need of this,” she said to no one
in particular, though the fluffy black cat
watched her, as he often did.

And she withdrew the bones of her feet
and arranged them prettily on the table,
as though from an archaeological site,

the phlanges and metatarsals, names
she had long ago learned in anatomy class,
and above them, from her purse,

emerged the bones of her legs—the long
tibias and fibulas—and above them
the patellas that underlaid her knees,

anchors for the strong femurs that locked
like baseballs into the glove of hip sockets
around the pubis, the coccyx and the sacrum.

She stood back, admiring her arrangement,
mindful that it was not truly hers, that
the framework of her existence was a gift

from the ancestors, so she murmured her
thanks into the ether, trusting that it would be
received as she hoped to be. Resuming her task,

the vertebrae tumbled out of the purse of
her body like dice, and she chuckled as she
gathered them up and studied them carefully

before putting them in the correct order.
“You’ve been such a good body,” she said then,
assembling the cage of her sternum,

the humerus of her arms, the ulna and radius
of her hands, then moving upward to arrange
the long collarbones and stacking the cervical

vertebrae of her once elegant neck. And there
she paused, as the cat cried and she smiled.
“Thank you for the good life,” she said,

retrieving the heavy ball of her skull
to top the horizontal sculpture on the table,
just before her boneless skin suit fell to the floor,

and the cat walked over to it to sit on the last
bits of her warmth, curling up, as he so often did,
for a good nap.

•••

With thanks for the inspiration from the first line of the poem “Table” by Edip Cansever (translated from the Turkish by Julia Clare Tillinghast and Richard Tillinghast). And thanks to Phyllis Cole-Dai, Author for the prompt and her joyous Joysters group.