The Little Caesar’s down the street has gone out of business.
Someone stole the sign’s plastic sheath,
the skeleton of dead florescent lights exposed.
An idle child chipped the paint off the windows
with a broken piece of glass.
Around the corner, the burnt house is sinking
into the lead-poisoned ground, its roof
caved in, the window panes manipulated by flames,
tinted to oil-stain blue.

The funeral home
used to be a liquor store
but there’s more business in death than drunkenness
these days.
They kept the bars on the windows
and the gate on the door.
The dead must be protected, respected
and restored.

09/23/2009

Author's Note: This was an in-class exercise in my Poetics (theory of poetry) class, a response to Tao Yaun-ming's "Poem in the Form of a Coffin Puller's Song."

Posted on 09/23/2009
Copyright © 2010 Stephanie Lane Sutton