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A bear becomes Howard Briening in the locker room, and high school astonishment collapses animal recognition, skinning, and memory into a single blunt question of place.

The comparison is so exact that it feels both comic and unsettling. Locker room and skinning put the body under scrutiny, whether human or animal, civilized or stripped down. "Where else?" sounds like disbelief turning suddenly into inevitability.

A six-line jolt of recognition: 'The Bear looked exactly like / Howard Briening in the locker / room.' The poem yokes a hunted animal to a remembered classmate, and the dangling 'Highschool and skinning' lets the locker-room body and the skinned carcass occupy one frame. 'Standing there astonished' is left grammatically loose - it could be the bear, the boy, or the speaker - and the curt closing 'Where else?' converts that astonishment into deadpan inevitability, as if such a likeness could surface nowhere but here.