Micheal Mott

Missing

issue 01 December 2012

What is so noticeably lacking
in Mathew Brady’s interviews
with the dead are the smells;

likewise in Ambrose Bierce’s corpses
their faces gnawed by hogs
near the Greenbrier, Cheat, Gauley;

or the wounded roasted in gullies
a foot deep in leaves
at Shiloh, Spotsylvania;

and you, reader, cannot supply
what is left out.  So how much more
eludes us? . . . the scent in the rain.

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