Anna Journey’s ‘I Object to the Etymology of Sacrum’

Anna Journey writes on the ‘site of infernal nerve spark and spasm,’ in a poem from LARB Quarterly no. 47, ‘Security.’

By Anna JourneyDecember 31, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Poetry

This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 47: Security. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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I Object to the Etymology of Sacrum: Os Sacrum: “Sacred Bone”

If there were ever a holy bone
in the body, it wouldn’t sit at the base
of the spine: site of infernal
nerve spark and spasm, gravity’s
ongoing joke. Why would the soul
live here? Sacrum: that shield-shaped
compound bone of five
fused vertebrae, inverted triangle,
white mask filled with round
holes—like an ice hockey goalie’s—
through which nerves pass.
What if the Latin sacrum’s just a bad
translation from the older Greek?
When the physician Galen
called the dense bone hieron osteon,
hieros can mean either “holy”
or “strong.” I’m telling you:
some scribe got it wrong. Before
the sports medicine doctor jabs
the longest needle I’ve ever seen
deep into the capsules of my inflamed
SI joints, a nurse hands me a gray chunk
of three lumbar vertebrae
cast in polyurethane to squeeze
as a stress ball. I thought of Osiris,
god of resurrection, for whom
the sacrum formed the site of the Egyptian
afterlife’s first spark. It’s only
a ruddy half-dark here
on the hydraulic exam table
as I lie with my eyelids shut, bare-assed
and butt-up in my private
underworld. My hips crinkle
the disposable crepe paper sheet.
I clear my throat, crack a joke
about today being a full moon,
according to my desk calendar. Get it?
I ask the masked doctor as he watches
my contrast-dyed X-ray
cloud and eddy from the steroid’s
shot in real time. Galen advised
his medical students to study
the corpses of slain gladiators
or drowned sailors who washed up
in the sand, so the scholars
would better understand
the human body. The sacrum,
due to its thickness and size, takes
longer than other parts of the spine
to rot. And maybe the ancients
thought that hardness
was holy enough. In the myth,
the rival god with the torso of a greyhound
drowns Osiris, then scatters the cadaver
across Egypt in fourteen parts. I left the part
of my body able to sit without pain
on that airplane still hovering
in its flight path somewhere
above Tulsa. You should’ve stood more,
I’ve told myself for nearly two years, rubbing
the aching ridge of my sacrum. You did this
to yourself. You did great, the nurse says
as she swabs my ass with the cool
swipe of an alcohol wipe,
tugs my joggers to my hips
with a practiced gentleness. I hand
back to her the novelty squeeze ball’s
three nerveless vertebrae. 

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Featured image: Odilon Redon, The Battle of the Bones, ca. 1881. The J. Paul Getty Museum, CC0. getty.edu. Accessed December 29, 2025. Image has been cropped.