Pelvis with the Distance

                 for Caro

We have a bag of bones in the back seat: cradle 
           of sacrum, blood-tinged spine.

           You gathered them from the scorched grass 
at Mosquito Creek. Held them to your chest

without tenderness, the way we held onto resentments 
           the August we became friends—

           our misplaced devotion to love gone bad.
I thought I smelled lingering flesh behind us,

           rotting in the heat. I always come back to Georgia 
O’Keeffe, cleaving herself from Stieglitz to summer

at Ghost Ranch, lining her windows with the bleached skulls 
           of cows. She never wanted her parted poppies

           and seamed irises to be viewed 
as vulvas. It was Stieglitz who proposed

the resemblance: The woman receives the World 
           through her Womb. [. . .] The mind comes second.

           No wonder she began painting bones 
instead—empty pelvises—each hole a viewfinder

for her dark eye. We kick up clouds of dust
           as we drive, mottling the roadside yarrow,

           strangely more living, now
that we owe our innermost parts to no one.

Title taken from a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe. Italicized phrases are from Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe, respectively.

Read more from Issue 21.1.