Stained wood with knots chosen for their size
construct the shack. Trash has been thrown about:
a broken chair, empty liquor bottles,
a box labeled Campbell’s Tomato Soup,
filled with cartons of Kellogg’s. An open loaf of bread
drying out on the table next to a kerosene lamp.

The occupants have evidently been day drinking.
Homer has a pain in his side
and calls a doctor.

Only later do the men ask him
to check on Wilby who lies in the bed,
blankets covering her cold face. The woman
is dead. Was the oven to blame, the exhaust
filling her lungs? Or was it too cold
and she, too drunk? Police take a photo, but not before
pulling the blanket off her face. No one
asks whose hand had pulled it up
to cover her face, how the chair got broken.

The men seem grieved.
Like the sneer of a great white shark,
a crosscut saw hangs from a hook.
A woman lies dead in a bed