On Wolff’s Law

Wolff’s Law states a bone under repeated weight
bucks up instead of buckling,
lays down a milky layer of calcium,
thickening itself against all incoming.

The consent form leaves this part blank:
that hauling you through winters of appointments
would leave my skeleton denser than yours,
my spine is a time clock of each standing hour
in a hallway smell-stained with vinyl and bleach.

My last scan came back marked excellent bone density.
The doctor praises my posture, unaware
of the wheelchair ramp I planned and pinned myself
out of two-by-fours and tough Saturdays.
Every transfer from bed to chair to bed again,
each one a compounding cost to my own edifice.

Density resembles strength, with a nasty little secret.
Dense bones carry more, until the day
they shatter when they should bend:
a hairline becomes a fault line
becomes a floor that leaves me,
for once, needing a hand up
instead of offering it.

I used to fathom love was muscle,
bruising and self-forgiving weekly.
I know now love is skeletal:
invisible, carrying a heaviness
heavier than it was yesterday,
until carrying becomes its identity.

This is the illusion that endurance is free,
that a body can ferry a weight unending.
And this is the truth given back: a density,
unpredictable, calcium coming cell by cell,
in the dark of me, until one day I could carry you
across a room and set us both down
gently, together, the next hairline now forming.

Magnus Briar is a poet based in Winnipeg, Canada. Their work blends the regional and the mythic, exploring displacement, recovery, and grief. Their poetry has been featured in Funicular, Showcase, Double Dutch, and others.