The Taxidermist in the Revered Museum

stares down head and claw on the table
to make something whole again.

Perhaps she’s unnerved by the prospect, death
back to life. But that we crave not

just intact but true is the first wish as when
an old mount from the ’30s is taken out of

the standard formal pose-of-that-day, its
upright-for-eternity habit of ninety years,

its straight-ahead looking through glass.
Just relax, the taxidermist might soothe

that forever young red kangaroo,
trading bone for wire to make

the old arsenic-laced stuffing release and relax
into our mode and our fashion,

or foam-replace its skeleton completely before she
needles up the time-stopped creature

that will slip to the ground to lounge dreamy
and casual in pretend desolation,

some Outback diorama I would have
loved every Saturday had I been a child in that city.

Surely I was a child in that city, surely anything
can happen—prophecies reverse and reclaim—

so much afterlife to rack up. Finally that
manta ray in her workshop. We stood staring

into the freezer, cold clouds rising up.
Washed ashore, pregnant, the taxidermist told me,

twin females we found in utero. Cheers for
scalpel and patience. Cheers all around,

she said, like a delivery room! Like
break-out-the-wine, I thought, like confetti.

Read more from Issue 18.1.