Keats Raptosh Conley
Your mother, whose name I could never pronounce
Dear Mom,
Today we killed the rooster and as we boiled
his bones I thought of the grandmother whose name
I could never pronounce but reminded me
of the Tom Petty song— ya never slow down ya never grow old.
How she used to sing the praises of bone broth, of collagen, never
of me. The rooster stock dresses the windows
in steam, and I imagine her own bone marrow
full of sardines and stubbornness. Potent as black garlic.
We are all broth-built. Do we make ourselves or do our selves
assemble like skimmed fat? Bodies boiled down from hollowness
we didn’t know was heritable. That’s why we had to kill the rooster:
too long in the spurs and too short in good nature.
The grandmother whose name I could never pronounce says
she doesn’t play bingo with the others, but walks with
the companionship of the river and the brisk salutations of strangers…
finds comfort in the widening space between their backs.
Keats Raptosh Conley is the author of the poetry collection Guidance from the God of Seahorses (Green Writers Press, 2021). She is currently a fish biologist in Idaho, where her work centers on threatened and endangered species.