Purely Aesthetic

East on the freeway,

Sandusky, Ohio rain—

Every quarter mile is marked

by soggy roadkill.  It’s a gallery;

an exhibit of small paintings

smeared by artists who only

used reds and blacks and one time

yellow to outline four incisors

partially exposed by a strained snarl—

groundhog teeth half buried in the green

skin of an Osage orange, unpalatable

to native wildlife and certainly not

a last bite before Eden. This Tim Burton

bastardization of roasted pig, this memento mori,

most likely emerging from the perverse

thoughts of a man; truck pulled over,

picking the Osage fruit from the berm, a natural

repellent of insects according to folklore.

Revelation, seeing the body, the joke was there.

Small jaw pried open by his naked hand, not

noticing the smell, so wrapped up in the pride

of this image he’s creating, of this message pointed

right at traffic—that death is not enough, that even

in your earthly absence, your body has a purpose;

not to be a rib cage for lilacs to sprout through,

but to be a warning that monsters are all around us

and they like to play with bones.

John T. Leonard is an award-winning writer, English teacher, and poetry editor for Twyckenham Notes. He holds an M.A. in English from Indiana University. His previous works have appeared in Poetry Quarterly, december, Chiron Review, North Dakota Review, Roanoke Review, Punt Volat, High Shelf Press, Rappahannock Review, Jelly Bucket, Mud Season Review, The Blue Mountain Review, Genre: Urban Arts, Stonecoast Review, and Trailer Park Quarterly. He lives in Elkhart, Indiana with his wife, three cats, and two dogs. You can follow him on Twitter at @jotyleon and @TwyckenhamNotes.