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Lovely in Your Bones

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© 2002 Sabina C. Becker
All rights reserved.

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones...
--Theodore Roethke

How lovely you are, my dear,
unclad of all your flesh! How I love
to stroke your stripped bones. The ivory
of your pure skull! Your hips--beyond speech!
They harbor no cellulite.
A coroner would lick his dry lips.
How sleek, how sweet
is the orbit of bone without a cheek.
How unutterably fair
is a socket, when no eye is there!
O my dear, you are a perfect woman,
you, a chiselled skeleton,
with neither bulky breasts nor noisome menstruation,
nor any other fleshly consternation.
More beautiful than your feet in shoes
are you, my lovely, in your bones!

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