I envy the gryptodont, ancient car-sized armadillo,
his thousand-bone-coat
But you can’t buy one of those in the museum store
So I tug on the stretchy gray cotton and absently trace
my own collarbone
Such a frail little skeleton is mine, still scented of fig from the shower.
I stare into the eyes of the white-furred Asian tiger,
count how many times I would fit into the ribcage of the fin whale suspended from the ceiling
Standing straight?
Curled into a ball?
Somewhere between the vibrantly feathered tatingers
and the porous kickball sized egg of the extinct elephant bird,
the chill creeps past the pink polish on my bare toes, sinks deep into my calves, knees, up into my arms, shoulders
And I am shivering there, uninterested in reading about the evolution of the mammal jawbone or the helmet of the beetle
But bracing against the terrible cold
Trying to hide the evidence screaming from my own ribcage and its small pink thermometers
As the whirling of my own centrifuge begins,
Leeching all the strength out of the iron pinions on which my skin hangs
Melting down the muscles and bones and spinning them inward toward the center
Every fiber silent and serving
The one that waits
Weeping blood
For the child that I was
And the ones who won’t meet my eyes on the subway platform
And for the ones I will not bear
Even now in August, the misting raindrops by the train station greet like icicles
But I crane my neck toward the sky and close my eyes
As if I deserve the cold stinging
For being such a small thing in the wide world
Just another homo sapien in the great hall, yellowed bones like the others
Like the skull of the triceratops or the giant sloth
While in my abdomen,
Small worlds make and break themselves.
I am bodily.
Terrestrial.
Of the earth like a geode.
