Black Rooms and Oracle Bones
Black rooms lie littered with bleached bones sterling white like plated silver tibia and fibia,
Their dainty curves drawing the eye across them as a mathematician’s compass draws truths
In leaden lines on carbon paper negatives. The doors have rooms and the rooms have their doors and
Their doors have an impression of what it is to be family and family parses bone and sucks on it as one
Would do of a spoon holding a favorite soup on a finely stagnant meniscus, a precipice into which void
May fall freely within. The void tastes like olfactory desecration. Black rooms have no need for this.
Coughs bring void back up. Family has no want for this and throws it back to the pile. The bones add up.
There is only so much rejection in one complete skeleton to toss aside. Black room takes pity and bones
And mathematics and rejection and compass and neatly piles its totems. Family puts bone in mouth
And breaks between teeth and drinks mercurial marrow and suffocates underneath, mad as a hatter.
Sun-stained bone fetishes mock and spin and dance storms. They speak with doors of ends and voids
And grandmother’s old silver bones. She has passed, and it is good she did not live to see this. Foamy-
mouthed exact calculating white precise still the end is here. Nucleus passes on and calcified electrons
Feast and share with black room and doors and compasses and carbon paper. Familial string theory
Collapses as oracle bones rise and declare that American normalcy is dead and that they murdered it.
About the poet:
Alice Mazzei is an (until now) unpublished Oneontan author of poetry, short stories, and strangely worded turns of phrase. She is currently a sophomore studying Psychology and English at SUNY Oneonta. She is set to be featured in the biannual campus publication “Art and Scope” for their first issue of 2018. Her non-writing occupations include amateur photography, working at the on-campus bookstore, and being an LGBTQ+ advocate. Any questions for her should be sent to .
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