The Ministry of Loneliness by Beth Gordon

The Ministry of Loneliness

Artificial human bones are permitted on domestic
                 flights according to the official
memo released on Valentine’s Day and the television
                 is saturated with snowboarding
teenagers, the purge of high school students, primordial
                 tears of politicians. You tell me you
found a dead body when you were eight years old, the one
                 the police were looking for down
river, you thought she was a tree stump but the shredded
                 linen blouse required a second look,
your sister threw up the scrambled eggs and half-cooked
                 bacon your mother served that morning.
Your father said her eyes were gone, swallowed by radioactive
                 crabs and turtles who savored the juicy
flesh, she jumped, you tell me 50 years later, and you never
                 found out why.  I want to insert an ice
pick into my frontal lobe, the sanctuary of my tear glands,
                 it’s no mystery to me that she wanted
buzzards on the highway’s edge, that she pushed herself through
                 the concrete surface of water, that she
wanted to die without stranger’s saliva or bullets on her skin.



​Bio: Beth Gordon is a writer who has been landlocked in St. Louis, Missouri for 16 years but dreams of oceans, daily. Her work has recently appeared in Into the Void, Quail Bell,Calamus Journal, DecomP, Five:2:One, Barzakh, and others. She can be found on Twitter @bethgordonpoet.