by Rachel Voss
 |
| Richard III's skeleton as found in the grave beneath a parking lot. The remains of the King who died in the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485 were reburied in a tomb in Leicester's Anglican cathedral on March 26, 2015. |
What’s more naked
than bones? The whitewashing
of history, a ghostly rose
to honor the dead.
Which
dead? “It doesn’t look like
the face of a tyrant,” a woman
said. Hasn’t she heard
of Shakespeare (who couldn’t
have written a better ending),
or known any real sons of bitches?
It costs a lot of money
to look this immortal.
The onlookers point their thousand several phones,
and every phone takes several similar pictures,
and every picture condemns us all for vanity.
Now is the spring of our
reinterment. Despite
the line of worshippers
and the royal craze, I, for one,
am determined to hate
the idle pleasures of these days.
Rachel Voss is a high school English teacher and lives in Queens, New York. She graduated with a degree in creative writing and literature from SUNY Purchase College. Her work has previously appeared in Hanging Loose Magazine, Borderline, WORK, Blast Furnace, and The Prompt Literary Magazine, and is forthcoming in Newtown Literary and the Silver Birch Press Great Gatsby Anthology.
