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splinterswerve
Calgary, Alberta, Canada
splinterswerve.hotmail.com

for John Steffler, turning 60

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by Wendy Morton

Bypass Bob, my neighbor, who got that name
because he had five of them after he fell
into a ditch in the middle of a marathon
and died and was saved by the two nurses
just behind him,
pays close attention
to everything, having heard the moose
on his roof, all right.

So Bypass Bob tells me he saw Dan,
the local taxidermist driving down
Bear Hill Road, hell bent for leather,
in his pickup, the back filled with
the heads of big horn sheep, deer heads
with antlers, a full sized stuffed black bear,
held up with ropes.

My other neighbor, Babs, says
she drove by Dan’s house
to find it empty, except for all the notes
on the door marked “ Urgent”.
“Angry notes, they were,
threatening extinction with large weapons,
if you catch my meaning,” she said.

Then Pam, the postmistress, said
her sister who runs a Travel Lodge
in town saw Dan, naked as a jaybird,
sleepwalking one night around midnight
right by the pop machine.

And so it’s gone since you left town.
Come back. Order the world again.
Read us your poems.