Ellen Bass

Ellen Bass's poetry includes The Human Line (Copper Canyon 2007) and Mules of Love (BOA 2002) winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Her work has been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Field, and The Kenyon Review. She coedited, with Florence Howe, No More Masks! An Anthology of Poems by Women and her nonfiction books include Free Your Mind and The Courage to Heal. She teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University as well as at conferences and writing retreats nationally and internationally.

Website: http://www.ellenbass.com

Eating the Bones

The women in my family
strip the succulent
flesh from broiled chicken,
scrape the drumstick clean;
bite off the cartilage, chew the gristle,
crush the porous swellings
at the ends of each slender baton.
With strong molars
they split the tibia, sucking out
the dense marrow.
They use up love, they swallow
every dark grain,
so at the end there's nothing left,
a scant pile of splinters
on the empty white plate.

by Ellen Bass
from The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007)