How Did the Foxes Die?
London, 1970
“Exsanguination,”
read the tabloids,
as if by some fanged hominid
roosting in the catacombs,
hunting crepuscular creatures
at London's Highgate Cemetery.
“A vampyre contagion.”
Would it's appetite turn
to wandering coeds or a pensioner
on her constitutional?
Legend tripping teens
and devotees of poltergeists
breached the cemetery wall
to plunder nests of the undead.
Some discovered a sepulcher
was a suitable place to fornicate.
A proselytizing warlock
led the hunt. He turned up
nothing sanguinarian but bats
whose droppings filled niches
of a columbarium. By sunrise,
a coffin had been forced
and police preferred a charge
of interference with a corpse:
The warlock had sewn human
remains with rosaries and garlic.
How did the foxes die?
Pesticide. And a feral dog.
With brush and blood intact.
I-70 Review, Summer / Fall 2022
London, 1970
“Exsanguination,”
read the tabloids,
as if by some fanged hominid
roosting in the catacombs,
hunting crepuscular creatures
at London's Highgate Cemetery.
“A vampyre contagion.”
Would it's appetite turn
to wandering coeds or a pensioner
on her constitutional?
Legend tripping teens
and devotees of poltergeists
breached the cemetery wall
to plunder nests of the undead.
Some discovered a sepulcher
was a suitable place to fornicate.
A proselytizing warlock
led the hunt. He turned up
nothing sanguinarian but bats
whose droppings filled niches
of a columbarium. By sunrise,
a coffin had been forced
and police preferred a charge
of interference with a corpse:
The warlock had sewn human
remains with rosaries and garlic.
How did the foxes die?
Pesticide. And a feral dog.
With brush and blood intact.
I-70 Review, Summer / Fall 2022
