I forgive you fingers. I forgive you wrists and palms. I forgive you web of veins, the nameless knuckles, twenty-seven bones, the nails and moons below. I forgive you feet, the toes and toenails, metatarsals arching up, cuneiform, the cuboids, and navicular. I forgive you sole of foot, fibrofatty pressure chambers, dense packed nerve and tissue, the spring ligament. I forgive you ankle, lovely with twin bone swells. I forgive you calf abundant, knee cap, knee joint extra complex and temperamental. I forgive you bone and sinew, blood vessel and braid of muscle. I forgive you tidal lymph. I forgive you skin, the coast on which all washes up. I forgive you thigh and buttock, anus, vagina, clitoris, urethra, mons a rounded mass of fatty tissue, inner and outer lips, the smooth stretch of perineum. I forgive you sacroiliac, the bone wings laced with tendon, the pelvic inlet and the brim. I forgive you coiled intestines lined in tissue soft as velvet, the uterus and eggs inside of ovaries, the fluting tubes Fallopian, the docile stomach sack. I forgive you my esophagus, moist mucosa, heart and lung lobes, liver, kidneys, pancreas and gall bladder, the spleen—all the inner organs curled together in the dark and muttering like clocks, like memories of clocks. I forgive you. I forgive you breasts, your lobes and lobules, ducts and alveoli rising to the darkened areola and the nipple passage outward. I forgive you golden seams of fat in semi-liquid state, encasing in your oily cells the poisons of the world. I forgive you mouth, the teeth and budded tongue, the epiglottis, pharynx and the tough-ringed trachea, the larynx with its cords for making sound. I forgive you nasal cavity and sinuses, the ear canal and clear-walled eyeballs—all the head holes opened to the rain of light, the floating atoms of the air, the jacked together molecules of the stupid human world. I forgive you ropey muscles of the neck and face, so overstrained from constantly composing mirrors. I forgive you brain, three pounds of convoluted meat plastered with grey nerve cells, wrapped in blood-rich tissue, floating in your own sweet bath of fluid. I forgive you spinal column sprouting from the brain stem, flaring wires to spark electric charges through dumb tissue. I forgive you glands, both tubular and alveolar, releasing streams of chemicals and mucus, sweat and milk and oil. I forgive you every hair bulb, constantly dividing, pressing hardened protein shafts up toward the light. I forgive you cells, all one hundred trillion, the inner ocean that has ebbed and flowed across three million years. I forgive you every part performing all the intricate and simple tasks that make this mass alive. I forgive you all for already having died.
from Denver Quarterly