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An old insect photograph… by Robert Kramer

From a time when mesh flyswatters
and honey-colored flypaper
coiling down from a ceiling lamp
were in summer ubiquitous,
when hovering insects
accompanied every trace of organic life,
from the feces of dogs
to the blue-glazed bowl of green apples
on your dining room table:
thus on a tiled floor crackling
with yellow woodshavings and sawdust,
beneath the gutted belly of a pig
hung on iron hooks
high on the wall above him,
in his once white,
now bloodstained apron,
in his slightly tilted bowler hat —
with his left hand flicking a fly from his face
the master butcher laughs,
my beloved uncle,
who died in Cuba in the Spanish-American War
of mosquito-borne malaria.

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Former Director of International Studies at Manhattan College, Robert Kramer is a widely published poet, playwright, critic, and translator of European Literature. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Munich, Germany and a Swiss Confederation Scholar in Bern, Switzerland. He is also past coordinator of the New York Poets Cooperative.