Blackened semi-smile
eyelidlifted turned
rust fur Can’t get a
fix on
mangled slab of splintered bone
stringy red muscles
Armpit trying to raise
mouth milk,
eyes
staring at something great.
Eyes like headlights still on
on twisted steel.
0070 64 F 04 is sad,
he’s looking up to the right
cheeks bulging.
Some are camouflaged, it seems,
with death labels &
plastic label bags
–ears show,
a tooth rip.
Black skin rubble
no eyes upper teeth
in death lisp.
Faceless, no, burned to
a congealed
insectile smear.
Shattered lit
skull rubble through which
one eye blasts.
Maroon head skin
tucked up about its bag shoulder
as if asleep.
What am I looking at?
At horror looking through
an 1899 update:
after the lynch picnic,
the knuckles of Sam Hose displayed
in the window of an Atlanta grocery.
340 04 V 04
nearly all blood.
Very old man gray
turned head cupped
in death sheet blossom.
Clayton Eshleman
from An Alchemist with One Eye on Fire (Black Widow Press, 2006)