Winner of The Letter Review Prize for Poetry
Tailbone
There are ancient and
almost-lost and
next-to-unknowable secrets
that echo at a divine frequency
native only to a tailbone.
Somewhere,
tailbone-you is reaching out
beyond its own body-world
looking for that lost counterweight
for tree-walking and
soundless flying leaps,
for its mystical ability
to find the thinnest places in time,
where other lonely-only tailbones gather,
to know together (but never have again)
the wild freeness of
a thousand, thousand nights
spent beneath and among and
somehow inside of stars.
Tailbone-you and its fingerprints
echo through tailbone-me;
still and silent and warm without touching,
but nudging enough to send birds and
other creatures from the trees
in perfect synchrony before
an earthquake.
I wonder if,
tailbone-to-tailbone,
that backandbackandback
instinct–that makes
the hairs on your neck rise
at the electrically unsayable–
made you feel it
when I fell.
Kate Thuma is a poet living and writing in the Greater Boston area. Her work explores embodiment, memory, and the thresholds between the tangible and the unseen, with a particular interest in how language approaches what resists expression. She is drawn to the body as a site of inherited knowledge, where instinct and memory intersect. Her work has been supported by GrubStreet Boston, The Almanac workshop series, and the Boston Writer’s Salon. She is currently developing her first chapbook. Instagram: @katethumawrites