Love Your Bones

Love your bones, you must love your bones

For without these

How can any living person

work the journey of pavement to front door to commode to bed,

how can any child of the land

outwit the escalator or crosswalk or seesaw?

I heard a man near to me recently

declaim that he hated having bones,

that he wished to be made of flesh and blood rubber instead

and when I laughed there was an uproar 

and I had to explain that I didn’t mean to eavesdrop

but the cafeteria isn’t all that big:

it’s kind of like a small town

with bottomless iced tea 

and olive-green plastic trays for days.

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich’s poems have appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, Eighteen Seventy, Menacing Hedge, The Rye Whiskey Review and Cultural Weekly, among others, and he has work forthcoming in Pulp Literary Magazine and Eunoia Review. Rich recently served as Associate Editor for the online literary magazine BOMBFIRE. He is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me, a collection of poems published by Jules’ Poetry Playhouse Publications. Peep richboucher.bandcamp.com for more. He loves his life with his love Leann in the perpetually intriguing Southwest.