VICTORIA CHANG
Postmortem Examination on the Body of Clifford Baxter
Clifford Baxter was a former Enron executive who committed suicide.
The body received in
blue workout pants,
short-sleeved blue T-shirt, brief-style underwear.
Those unlucky clothes that might have
seen the moon in June.
But they contain a body,
stiff as a canoe.
~
The head is deformed due to the bullet into
the right temporal area.
O to be born a bullet, mute for
most of its life,
One quick explosive motion
and pieces stray away,
search for bodies to embed in,
to make things beyond recognition.
~
An abrasion on the left hand and base of second digit.
How the fingers can never again point—
they are pointless,
permanent in disgrace, no longer able to insist,
to begin a list,
to buttress a kiss.
~
Small shards of glass on a shirt,
but nothing nearby broken.
The ring missing.
The body received without the hands
bagged. Even the dead must be contained.
Earlier a starling sat on a fence,
said nothing.
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