She perished young, and left a ravishing corpse. Already I am suspecting her complexions, the body that crawls, crumbles, collapses, as if to seep further into itself, how soon to seem the skin retreating. I admit I must stop myself from the urge to defile, to contort the form, give new shape to her structure, now a shell, hollowing the days, the days turned without her knowing. Though death took her, some might say, solemnly, it did not take the appearance of her working, working so hard on the words, to rescue pleasure from panic, for life to resemble more a feverishness, a rupture. It did not stop the cemeteries from whence she was raised from begging her return, delivering their brochures for arbors to become excavated, dust to become granite, the landscape to befit a grave. She died young, and her death caused no interruption. After all it was she, she who bereaved me.

Jared Daniel Fagen
07 02 16