Unpreserved

Open up the jelly in the sandwich, open
her drawers up, the jelly ones, the upper
drawers. Open up the jelly inside the jelly
drawers, always the multiple layers of jelly
like glass under glass but reddish. Purple
opening makes what is obscene readable. Open
up something red and the open is mere gore.
Purple gore is sexual and the people won't
have that except they will and not tell anyone.

Toe-tap, hotel-hop, dead prostitute or intern.

Open the prostitute, a coroner's job. People
and coroners have many drawers and jobs like
prostitution and many instruments in those
drawers to do the many jobs done in the red open
drawers of the body. Also coroners have scales
to weigh the jellied hearts, to judge them
enlarged, which tells coroners about the manner
of the bodies' closings down, some irregular
thing, vulnerable, overly full of itself as if
certain anatomies or jobs signalled the ability

to love more, to die younger, or to make dying into

a thing, a commodity, curiousity, a purplish bit
we are embarrassed to hold in an open hand
in an open room to call openly my father's
death, my mother's, my mistress's, my child's
death at three, as these are obscenities. Other
deaths are read as more mere, red. In the diner
on white linoleum, newspapers spattered with living
colonies of jelly shudder false and chemically with

no seeds-- as generic as any war- or street-

death--and fail to open us. We are surface on
all sides, we are smooth, hypocrite, resistant
to stain, cool and pale and drawerless. We do
not possess these deaths we leave beside
our tips. Smeared with strawberry-flavored
sucrose, these are somehow not our deaths. It's
as if no summer died to make this taste.