the buoyancy of Bone

by Ann Chinnis

(1991) I came upon a gray whale carcass along the shore, its body fouling the
littoral. Flies and flags of hide girdled the whale’s bones. Muscle and blubber
foraged. I touched a diamond-shaped bone—the whale’s lumbar
vertebra. Oil oozed from its pores, a sponge soothing my finger-tips. I
lived in solitude for a year on that island because I discharged a patient from
the ER who died. Because I feared people would see me oiled in failure.
I severed the bone from its articulations, carried it to keep me afloat.
Kneeling, I resettled it in the liminal where tide violates sand. Each incoming
wave inched the spine bone higher on the shore—closer and closer to the
whale—farther away from the ocean, so that I wanted to put the vertebra
back in the whale, not interrogate it.

Decades later. On night shift, a sound slipping under the ER’s sliding
glass ambulance door. Wind, I think. Then crying. My left hand aches from
holding what I could not keep alive.

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Ann Chinnis is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, 2025, and the author of three poetry books—“Poppet, My Poppet,” “I Can Catch Anything,” and “Love Song: Port & Starboard” (forthcoming). She is a retired Emergency Physician and a leadership coach and lives with her wife in Virginia Beach, Virginia.