Lisbeth White is a poet/dancer/performer and VONA alum. She works as an expressive arts therapist, supporting people in discovering the arts as healing. Her current poetry project centers around ancestry and the unique relationships women of color experience in connection to nature.

the hunger one

they say there are skeleton women
caught in nylon nets and called fury
re-membered from the sea floor
women who can sing flesh back onto their bones
call muscle like veal layered onto joints
whistle veins into place like river systems
they say all a woman like this needs
is a heart to hold onto
a hot thing pulsing her phalanges
a living rhythm to clutch
& her jawbone unlatches the incant
of her own re-creation

you grip fingertip bruises into my arms
as i heave my pelvis over wall after wall of you
i push my skin inside your skin
until we catch a certain blood &
blisters of tight heat erupt on the coccyx
both the cost & the serenade
the sudden unfettering
your tongue on my spine
my skeleton crisp on the air

[image: Skeleton Woman by Iris Compiet]

based on the Inuit myth “Skeleton Woman” as told by Clarissa Pinkola Estés