She always wore long sleeves
On the hottest of days.
Nothing to see here, she always said
Don’t worry. I’m fine.
Soundproof sleeves
woven by her mother
with threads of silence
no whisper leaked through
The X-rays tell a different tale:
Of old fractures, of injuries
Hidden beneath layers of flesh and fear.
The loom
an heirloom
it made no sound
only the wood was dented
Stripped of skin, defleshed to mere skeleton
Her life lays bare on a cold slab
Exposed like dead-white maggots
Fat, wriggling, reluctantly pulled out
From hollow eye sockets full of hell.
The warp thread tension
was nonadjustable
the weft thread
often broke
A chip here. A groove there.
Violence records itself in bone.
We can be read by those
Who decipher death
Who study the language of cruelty.
We do not give up our secrets easily.
Sshhh
a chip here
a groove there
random pattern
clink, clatter
clack, clank
hush
Nothing to see here, she always said
But
We know
We know
The bones always know.
Rattle, click
hem stitch
Yay, a collaboration between Shuku and me, based on her poem for day 17. It’s off prompt for today, but it has influences of a number of the other prompts. It’s a very busy day today, so I can’t look up which ones.
Day 5: Today’s (optional) prompt, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem that, like the work in Translucence, reacts both to photography and to words in a language not your own. Begin with 
Unassorted stories 