(First appeared in Press, Issue 2, Fall 1996; and is also in The Soup of Something Missing.)
The Man in the Vat of Honey
The nurse sat in the waiting room writing
to her sister. In a small and glorious handwriting
she wrote that she hadn’t yet found a husband
among the injured men; and she was disappointed,
a sailor she liked drowned when his ship broke apart
in heavy winds. His body was now held
in a tall vat of honey behind the clinic. This was the way
corpses were kept during monsoons when the ground
was too thick with water for burials. She imagined him
sticky-sweet and folded at the bottom of the vat
as he might have looked on the ocean floor before his body,
released of fear and breath, ascended. She once sat
with her ear against the vat, hoping to hear what the dead say
to themselves, waiting as she would wait for the ground to dry.
But the only sounds were from alley cats stretched
across the lid, their coarse tongues licking the dried honey.
