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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