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Like Brie

Meat locker death is a shivering place
made mostly of hooks, 
torn, torn guts of equipoise.
I was plastic towel racks with lousy screws.
My walls of strength were all charades.
There it was: the hailstone,
bigger than the street it hit.
I should have been there 
to hang and tilt paintings 
of your last drawn breath.

From windows of an empty house,
a sunrise looks like sauerkraut,
sunsets mimic refried beans.
There was hidden color here 
in splinters of remaining wood.
You went like brie exposed to air -- 
too fast for tongues
to lick the richness from the rind.
I was busy with naive,
asking for the picnic back,
coaxing tulips through hard ice.

Later I would gather 
crumbs inside a poem.
Its checkered tablecloth for bags 
to seal away unwanted fumes.
My visits short and squatty rites -- 
crew cuts on a shaggy dog 
I was too lazy to bathe.
Sagging corn husks of your hands
were meant to be the braided art
that dresses up a lonely field.
Even in your suffering,
gifts you left deserved my lids 
forked open in this wilderness.

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