What My Autopsy Will Reveal
       

The glass houses of organs were bottles
with ships atilt inside. Stones made fences
where not even dust should have been raised.

Hits were recorded, not recovered from; meals
became anthropologic; wisdom was lost
long before memory was impacted like molars.

A tree damaged more than fifty percent in a storm,
this body, split along the sap lines, should have
long ago been removed, stump dug up,

trunk ground down, its remains spread
over the mango roots to fertilize the living fruit,
the one task it could embrace without failure.

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Copyright © 2016 Jen Karetnick All rights reserved
from American Sentencing
Winter Goose Publishing
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission