Bones

What cloud did we wake?
The spindly one,
the acid rain,
the spider vein.

A child sucks it up
and blows out a bubble
shaped like a dead frog,
legs mid-leap and rainbow.

You drive us to Tucson,
your pale hair wild in the open window.
Past a ranch with ostriches
and stingray tanks built on sand.
In tandem we marvel and bleed.

And somewhere a daughter watches
her mother baking bread, picking weevils
from the wheat, saying,
These are flour fairies, my love.
We don’t want to bake them up.

Once you changed a theatre lightbulb
and found a cockroach bleached white
as a flower. You couldn’t wait to tell me.

This desert glows with uncountable thorns.

Not all children have to be bones,
nor all bones be discarded.

We can pluck them like daisies
from the lakeshore,
taste them,
give them names.

Emilia Joan Hamra lives in Philadelphia where she founded and edits The Shoutflower, a print journal of art and literature. She studied Creative Writing at Arizona State University, has worked as a copy-editor for Four Way Books, and was the recipient of the national Norman Mailer College Poetry Award. Her work is published in Occulum, giallo lit, Santa Ana River Review, the tiny, and others.