Amy DeBellis

Consider The Grave

Consider the gravediggers. Consider the flat tongues of earth
flipped over, new maws glaring slitted through the trees. Consider
the soil: the empty, the marrow, the salt. Do you remember the summer

suburbs blanketed with light? Pollution that never stopped.
Nights studded with mosquitoes instead of stars. And you
buried so deep in me that you felt rooted, like you were a tree and I
the wet loamy dark that cradled you. Our hearts and lungs
beating, breathing, and everything we ever thought or loved
or imagined contained in two gray fistfuls each. Six pounds
and mostly fat, the fat mostly water. Now consider

the grave robbers. The removal, the dissection,
the emptying. Corpse to cathedral to skeleton. 
Consider the corpus honeycombed. Can you see the body
unburdened? Can you see all of these empty spaces,
weeping light?

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Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her writing has appeared in various publications including X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, HAD, Write or Die, Fractured, and The Pinch. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books (2025). Read more at amydebellis.com