At night my skeleton sheds his skin and walks about on legs so thin they clatter as he skulks away— alive at night, he spurns the day. In dreams I hear him on the stairs and follow him in moonlight’s glare down darkened hallways, then outside where shadows play and demons hide. The graveyard calls him from afar, a silent garden ‘neath the stars, the home of those who’ve gone before and lie entombed and are no more than skeletons without their skins, like mine who walks with bony shins to find old friends now buried here in graves forgotten, tombs now feared. And when my skeleton returns, I see he seems much happier, somehow free to reassume his place in me, aware that we are made as one, a living pair.
About the Author Neal Donahue was born in Maine but grew up on Long Island. His college education in Oklahoma was subsidized by the Navy and he majored in English. After serving 5 years as a submarine officer, he taught elementary school in Massachusetts and Vermont, incorporating poetry into his curriculum. Neal has had a number of poems published in small journals. About the Artist Kasia Runté is a 20-year-old university student in Health Sciences who expresses the dark and light recesses of her mind through her art.
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