HAND MIT RINGEN

                  —from Bertha Roentgen's hand X-ray



This is my bone bound with your ring.

Hinged in brevity my hand fans,
My skin is a requiem. Remember me 1896.
In the gesture I beckon:

Enter my ghost's corridor & shipwreck.
Crawl between the piping of my satin casket.
Here are the keys dangling from my pelvis-

Touch my skeleton.

This is the way into my darkness
Where I inhume the whalebone beneath
The window then nestle into the pine box bed

To shroud myself with the less
Gentle sex. Slamming doors, letting the wind
Blow through my legs. Skull & cross-

Bone mad. Here, I vanish

Only to arrive days later, disheveled.
The X-ray's predilection for cells
Out of place suits me. This debridement

Is better than the old cinch & buttress.
Exhume my first wanton hologram:
The rat's nest & glass eye, my ten charred nails.

I am radiant.