“Piecemeal” by Bianca Spriggs

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They go for the eyes and nose first.
The flies and then the ants. They go
for the gelatinous black pudding of her
eyes, then the waxy graypink softmeat
of nose, anything that can be easily picked
off and digested. Overnight, her corpse
turns into a twenty-four hour diner,
a deconstruction site. The insects carry
her away, tasting, and sucking,
and in mandible-fuls. Her stiff, graybrown
fur moves not with the breeze, but with
their wriggling shiny bodies, their wings,
their countless legs writhing with an incessant
compulsion to feed wherever they can find it.
As she swells, bloating with blood
and the gas of liquefying organs,
they frenzy about, mad with the scent
of putrefaction—they work fast.
And they work in shifts for weeks,
climbing over her tough, rigor-mortised tail,
and her pale, bony, curled-in paws.
In and over and through her front to back,
they burrow, even after she explodes
from the summer’s heat, her ribs and pelvis
collapsing beneath a crazy quilt of bristled
fur until a soaking rain proves her skeleton
yet remains. God only knows how she died.
But there she is, lying in the back lawn,
stretched out on her side in the mulch
among the showy daylilies, a few feet away
from the blueberry bushes planted just last year
showing off knuckles of hard, hazy-skinned fruit.
For a city rat, falling down dead in the middle
of so much living luxury is more elegant
a death than her marauder’s life
surely deserved. And yet, she will continue
to sink to the dredges of the unmourned-for,
her grave, the eternal opening and shutting
of so many little mouths.

-Bianca Spriggs

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