Bone Marrow's Spongy and Daddy Don't Lie
by Jaclyn Garver
My dad used to watch TV shows about what happened after death. (He doesn’t talk about them much these days.)
This was his favorite detail, the one my dad—unreligious, though his mother insisted, Just open your heart to Jesus. It’ll be OK, whose father began to pray in the years before death, Just in case—would present as proof of the soul:
I
They put this dying man in an air-tight casket,
and at the precise moment of passing,
the glass split.
It cracked.
Something
escaped.
II
My dad is not a liar. That is not is way.
If he said, I found
the complete skeleton of
a brachiosaurs in
the backyard, I’d call
the archeologists.
I wouldn’t even need to see
the bones before I’d call.
If you beat him
at cards, he might throw
his hand with the force of
a right hook, make his aces and kings
do the air-hockey slide
across the kitchen table—but he’s not
a cheat. His single ghost story
about the night of two-ton ink barrels
and nooses holds the truth to me
of E=mc2 or Newton and all his
thermodynamics.
III
I don’t believe in God like the
monotheists or the poly,
don’t call it him or father or
Yahweh or Sal, but within the
spongy marrow of my bones I know
I contain new blood cells to make
new blood cells to make
new cartilage and fat and bone to make
love like starbursts and tingles
in my teeth to make
poetry the texture of mountains
and lace to make
a soul
IV
because my father told me so.
About the Author
Jaclyn Youhana Garver is a freelance writer and editor from Fort Wayne, Indiana. She has been featured on the website Poets Reading the News, the literary magazine Narrow Road and the Superstition Review blog (forthcoming). Her work has also been chosen by the Wick Poetry Center as a Traveling Stanza selection.