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| What happens when a body is done with its light? | ||
| We stood over the mangled rabbit and waited. | ||
| The form breathed and it wasn't an ebbing, | ||
| life was there and there and there | ||
| filling the lungs till a stillness rose up | ||
| from the bloody box | ||
| and we grew still in it. | ||
| What happened next | ||
| made us open a little further, | ||
| our mouths parted as if in compensation | ||
| for the faulty breather, the one forgetting | ||
| his first job. | ||
| It wasn't death's cloudiness | ||
| that made us stare, not | ||
| the paling eye, | ||
| or the way we disappeared in it. | ||
| From the fur and the skin | ||
| a tiny exodus commenced: mites and deerticks | ||
| and fleas leapt from that body | ||
| as from a listing ship. | ||
| How did they know and why did they care? | ||
| Wasn't the blood still warm and therefore good? | ||
| We watched as each miniscule refugee | ||
| swam away from death or eternity, | ||
| paddling on their little legs towards us. | ||
| Artwork: Tracey Anderson / Collaboration Statements |