David A. Bart - poems
  • Intro
  • Home
  • Kingdom Come
  • Tunnel of Love
  • Exit Now
  • The Passion
  • Texas Education
  • Dumb Supper
  • Good Year
  • Toys
  • Saint Michael and the Devil
  • Invisible Knights
  • The Rain Gauge
  • Ponder
  • Remainder
  • Green Ghost
  • December 13th
  • Dedication
  • Prevailing Wind
  • Dreamland 1911
  • 10
  • On the Median
  • These Things Happen
  • White Water
  • The October People
  • Scene from a Moral Panic
  • Estrellita
  • Another Ending
  • What We're Dealing With
  • How Did the Foxes Die?
  • There was a Man
  • Bio. and credits
Picture
What We're Dealing With

​Hazmat silhouettes moved
along the white maze.
They pitched another plastic
wall to conceal
“The worst...”


A coat and slacks still hung on a corpse
propped up in a crate. The thorax
of a baby lay at its feet.
“The worst horror movie...”


A groundswell of putrescence.
Spines and craniums gripped
by the green fur of rural Georgia.
“The worst horror movie you've ever seen.”


From the incinerator a moldering
face looked out. In a plot of milkweed
and medical waste a hearse rusted.
The woman inside had begun to mummify.
“The worst horror movie you've ever seen.
Now imagine that ten times worse.”

A multitude abandoned
to the climate and the flies,
undiscovered for years until
a woman walked her dog
across the crematorium grounds
and found, at every turn,


​a reliquary of grue.
“That's what we're dealing with.”

The coroner finished his statement.
Reporter's hands stabbed the air.
A helicopter's downblast rippled
the walls of an interim morgue
making body bags flap and shiver--
recumbent phantoms desperate
to rise up and depart such a world.

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