Poetry

Archaeologists Will Not Know Your Pronouns

Written for Rattle’s Ekphrastic Challenge, March 2025

Photo by Ryan Du on Unsplash

If they find me bleached and dismembered
in a shallow grave behind the schoolhouse,
the archaeologist who carefully dusts my skull
and measures the contours of my pelvis
will not have the context to know much but

There is more to me than skin and sinew
blood and bone on a museum placard;
the archaeologist might find my pronoun pin
or the locket from my grandmother or
some other cultural artifact that proves

I once built a life in the body that I was given,
moved stiff limbs on rainy mornings and
created for myself some semblance of identity,
pressing a body into the margins of law and medicine
to bring myself some small sliver of happiness,
the traces of which will be written in my bones.

This poem was written in response to a painting by artist Elizabeth Eve King, “Art Class — Siblings under skin,” chosen to be Rattle’s monthly…