Draft 1

Another day, another woman’s body found
bound, they report, and strangled and set ablaze.

Bound, they report, sharpening the gruesome details
with every repetition, adding the rope around the neck

and with the rope around the neck they add
that the body was still smoldering when the dogwalker found it.

The body, the it, that the dogwalker found while looking for
the woman, the woman who had had a life,

the woman who had had a life and a dog, and a dogwalker
whose own life will never be the same

for whose life could be the same after going to look for a woman
and finding a body strangled and bound and burned?

Strangled, bound, burned—how the pornography of violence
substitutes the description of the body for the depth of the life,

how the details of the body’s death become more glamorous than the life,
how the news staff knows the ratings will spike with certain lead-ins,

how certainly the lead-in body bound ablaze stay tuned will spike
interest in seeing what pictures might follow. Admit it, aren’t you curious?

Curious, how we learned to want to see the pictures, how after the camera
came along we learned to require photographic evidence of our bodies