Another to Cover Your Bones by Shan Cahill

1

Heart with two diamonds glued to their teeth.
Heart in their bed, lilac blankets washed up on their legs like wave caps at
sunset watering the flowers that someone left wilted on their skin.
Heart drinking coffee, a drop of java cascading down their chin, so focused on
lines of charcoal they don’t notice. They smudge the brown into the paper.
Heart with me, they tell me about the ghosts that haunt their apartment and
the woods that make them feel alive and how they have always been afraid of
the dark. Freckles like fingerprints, they trace them like constellations, eyes
closed tight when they reach each one and they tell me how much they wish they
could kiss me. They don’t tell me why they can’t and I don’t ask. We just sit.
Wishing.

2

Empty the contents of your cannibal Heart. What do you see? A smile with
two diamonds on teeth. Heart is lovely. I want to know them in the dark but their
fear holds me back behind a gauzy veil. I think they are in another universe.
I promise not to touch them, “it makes it worse,” they say. Instead, I lay in bed
while they paint on my back, creating a galaxy. “Somewhere we could live,” they
said. We are my favorite color palette. And I can feel them wishing on my stars
with every pause their brush makes.

3

There’s an artist named Valeska Soares who curates books with “love” in the
title spanning over several languages such as Italian, French, Spanish, and
English. Soares researches the titles of these books and has them reprinted to
match their first edition press with the cover color corresponding to the language
they were originally printed in. These books are then displayed as a group of five
hundred over four shelves, two hundred and fifty over two shelves, or one
hundred and twenty-five on one shelf. Inside each book, the pages are blank. 

​Shan Cahill

is an award-winning paper airplane maker, recreational juggler, and a writer living and working in the Berkshires. She has a cat named Moose and she spends her days rereading The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.