Featured Poem II • January 2014
Old Bone
Sandi Leibowitz
Old Bone come soon He come while sun too weak to argue while wind’s a scrabble of fingers ’long a banjo skin Come ashiver in the wheeze of frogs splutter up from silt and slough through moss and murk push past knobby cypress knees like the river birthin’ him Old Bone slick Come sliding up slow waters easy as a gator slicin’ duckweed Even so, he set the hounds to ranting raise their fur along their backs He know them old songs He know them tunes full o’ egrets’ white ghost wings and weepin’ Old Bone, thing he know best is gaps —loose fence-slats chinks in window-frames that big hollow opened up inside you since that last gal done drop you He know how sometimes you eye them river deeps thinking maybe down there’s better Old Bone like company like to tote you down there join his party in the crawfish mud chuggin’ river brew from gator skulls Yeah, he know you Old Bone come soon
Sandi Leibowitz has been the Sands Point Hag (see picture at right for evidence,) a Reveler, a ghostwriter for a monsignor, a secretary at the Museum of Natural History working behind the caribou diorama and a school librarian. She also sings classical music and performs early music on recorders and obscure instruments. Her speculative fiction and poetry appear in Goblin Fruit, Strange Horizons, Apex, Dreams & Nightmares, Niteblade and other far-out places.
She says that “‘Old Bone’ came to me out of nowhere; I just heard the phrase ‘Ol’ Bone come soon’ drawled in a southern voice, felt a creepy and foreboding feeling, and received the image of a swamp. We’ve all had moments of deep despair that threaten to drown us. Maybe all monsters rise from such deeps.”
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