Like Lavrinia

Like Lavrinia Merli, in 1890 in Mojola, Mantua, 
expired from hysteria and placed in a vault

on Thursday, July 3rd, where she regained consciousness, 
tore at the graves clothes her peasant husband had just

smoothed around her seven-month pregnant belly, 
and where she turned over and gave birth

but was not discovered until Saturday—
both mother and newborn then really dead;

like George Hefdecker of Erie, Pennsylvania, 
a farmer, who upon suffering a heart attack in 1889,

was temporarily buried until the purchase of a plot 
and was unearthed four days later

with his fingers so bitten off his hands no longer looked human;

like Mr. Oppelt, a wealthy manufacturer in Rudenberg 
whose vault, unsealed fifteen years after his death,

was found to contain a skeleton 
seated in the corner, the coffin lid off;

like the gendarme in 1889, dead-drunk on potato brandy, 
whose banging in the coffin caused the sexton to bore holes

though the Frenchman had by then mutilated his head 
in an effort to burst through and was fully deceased;

like the beggar turned up frozen

in a German village in 1807 and buried 
only to be disinterred when a watchman detected

lamentations from the grave

although by that time he had indeed suffocated; 
like them, yes, the air about my body dead

even in this abrupt consciousness.

  ▪ ▪