Did you know the coracoid process (from Greek κόραξ, crow) is a small hook-like structure on the lateral edge of the superior anterior portion of the scalpula? "Coracoid" in itself means "like a raven's beak", with reference to its shape.
The adult human body has 206 bones. An infant may have from 300-350 bones at birth. Some of these fuse together as the infant grows, for example in the skull, sacrum and hip bones.
How well do you know these pieces of your body? Is there one bone with which you are most familiar? Today’s prompt is to research and write about a bone in your body, picking a bone, being bone tired. In my poem below (published in Sierra Nevada Review in 2009) I imagined how Tamsen Donner viewed the bones of her dead husband.
Tamsen Donner
commits horrid acts with her husband Oct 1846
“…the cabins, by order
of Major Swords, were fired, and with them everything connected with this
horrid and melancholy tragedy were consumed…”
-
Edwin
Bryant, with the Eastward-bound army
after
conquering California, 1847
The
tent, canvas from the wagon, a pebbly texture
sagging
with ice, crackling
in
the cold night air.
Wind’s
monologue. Dead-cold trees.
From
within,
Tamsen
and her dying husband
watched
the layer of canvas
fearing
its failure,
the
loss of that distinction
between
inside and outside.
Storms
lasted 10 days at a time.
Starving
so,
bones
show through
into
a new shape of the person.
Now
the body is the shape of what’s inside;
the
inside emerges.
After
he died,
she
stroked his body, the bones
and
the tendons like wrapping twine
around
his femur, his radius and ulna
bones. She dressed him. Then
she
undressed him
to
use his clothing to warm herself.
He
lay naked, under a threadbare quilt:
Midwest
quilting socials, bills sewn
into
the squares, that hope,
scent
of freshly cut grass.
She
removed the blanket and
wrapped
herself in it,
gazing
and not
gazing. Was she still
the
woman who married him?
Was
he, in death,
the
man she married?
Tamsen
licked his wrist, remembering.
She
used her teeth, as when he used to bite
little
purple marks into her neck.
She
nibbled along
the
inside of his arm - she felt most familiar
with
this part of him, what was visible as he worked,
what
touched her
when
he held her face to kiss her. Most
familiar
and
most proprietary.
A
penknife was all that was needed
here
to slice out a piece
like
the curve of pink melon from its rind.
The
axe was used later
maybe,
to cut
the
bones. Her tongue
ran
across the inside
of
the inside of his arm. Its damp
baby-pink
surprising
beneath the brown
paper
bag skin
as if
here
was
the man she married. Here
was
the untouched
part. She savored the hope of him,
in
the hard white desert of winter:
his
release from the packaging of his body,
and
for her, a surrender
to
the inside, the outside layers collapsing
inwards,
heavy
tent
walls sagging. Silence pressed
upon
her. She chewed slowly
to
make him last, the soft
pink
arm, her eyes closed
in
pleasure.
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