No one retrieves the dead
this winter: there’s a cat
along Market Street, iced
 
so hard it could be bronze,
or the opossum we thought
was a dingy snow bank,
 
at the mouth to the clinic lot
a squirrel squashed so hard
the fringes of his blackened skin
 
meld to the asphalt, his tweaked
bones, arranged as Stonehenge, call
two-dimensional gods for revenge:
 
clear the way for the frigid wind
to cease the irreverence we do.
 
 
____
Jared Pearce’s collection, The Annotated Murder of One, was released by Aubade last year (www.aubadepublishing.com/annotated-murder-of-one.) His poems have recently been, or will soon be shared in Aji, Adelaide, The Aurorean, Xavier Review, and Armarolla. For samples and current doings, you’re invited to https://jaredpearcepoetry.weebly.com.
 
Photography by Jury S. Judge.