Ars Poetica: As Archaeologist

I scout for the wreckage:
Bone embedded in soil,
pot shard shaped once by
human hands, now smooth calcium
nestled deep inside earth’s
muddy pocket. My hands submit
to their memorized posture:
The constant cupping,
wrists ladling sand
like life-saving soup,
dumping this bounty
into a sieved bowl
that betrays inconspicuous
grains, revealing, eventually,
some lithic totem,
some evidence I existed before
my first breath, before reaching
for my first wound. I long
for the brown specks
that camouflaged my primordial
skin before I learned skin lured
predators, before I adapted
to this world’s fear. A steady
sun beats down on my digging,
but my limbs refuse rest.
Excavation is its own kind
of gift: The ordering, classifying,
naming what history forgets.

L. Renée is a poet and nonfiction writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her family migrated there from McDowell County, West Virginia. She holds a MFA in Poetry from Indiana University, where she served as Nonfiction Editor of Indiana Review and Associate Director of the Indiana University Writers’ Conference. Her work, nominated for Best New Poets and a Pushcart Prize, has been anthologized in Women of Appalachia Project's Women Speak: Volume 6. Her poetry won the Indiana University Guy Lemmon Award in Public Writing, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing Alumni Award, Appalachian Review’s Denny C. Plattner Award, as well as a 2021 Rattle Poetry Prize finalist and second place for the Crystal Wilkinson Creative Writing Prize from PLUCK! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and New Limestone Review. Her poems have been published or forthcoming in Tin House Online, Obsidian, Poet Lore, the minnesota review, Southern Humanities Review, Sheila-na-gig Online, and elsewhere. She believes in Black joy, which she occasionally expresses on Instagram @lreneepoems