Mating Call of the Re-Creation Pandabr>
after Melissa Milgrom
“Re-Creations are defined as renderings which include no natural parts of the animal portrayed…For instance, a re-creation eagle could be constructed using turkey feathers, or a cow hide could be used to simulate African game.”
–World Taxidermy Championships rulebook
Cleanliness is my only real fault:
I could have done with a little faux-shit
yellowing my rump, something to make it
seem like the bamboo I’m chewing will end up
somewhere. I bear the bodies
of seventeen grizzlies on my back alone:
peeled, dried, Clairol-dyed and quilted
into the whole of me. I know that my ears
were done with great tenderness,
and one quiet evening, my maker even
briefly held one in his mouth.
That I have no memory is hardly his fault:
I’m not even a ghost, since this requires both
life and death as precedent. Says the poet:
what is more precise than precision? Illusion. I am more
precise than the clockwork of your own
expiring mitochondria. Come closer.
Try to guess the provenance of my claws,
gently blow the dust from the smoked snifters
of my eyes. Imagine from what, or whom,
your own body could be collaged, whose
lips could be stitched into an homage
of your smile. Take my lie in your arms.
Two-Headed Taxidermied Calf
Deer Trail Pioneer Historical Museum, Colorado
I hated myself for pitying it—
nearly thirty years dead, and alive
for only a few hours—
as if that could do any good.
But there was something
in its tender swirls of ochre hair
that the amateur taxidermist
couldn’t quite make
laughable. Yes, the eyes
were badly-shaped, but I almost
believed them anyway. When they cut
the mother open, did the mouths bawl
in unison or harmony?
Did the lungs fill twice as fast?
I tried to convince myself
none of it was real, not even
the notarized signatures
of the rancher and vet,
remembering that faking provenance
is a hoax’s easiest gamble.
I thought of the days before the pills,
and the large stone my bad chemicals made
for me to carry, a secret
sideshow attraction
to myself: The Woman Who Smiles.
Step right up and observe her
perfect imitation of a person
who doesn’t want to die.
Caesar was a twin, the other
stillborn. They say
he believed if he swept
his arm across enough of the world,
he’d finally catch the brother
who’d abandoned him to dream
alone in the dark. I reached past
the display’s blunted barbed wire
to stroke one coarse flank.
When the animal was dying,
was it relieved it wasn’t dying
alone? Did all four eyes close
at the same time, two final streams
of milk-breath leaking
into the early prairie light?
I lied before, about Caesar
being born a twin. Sorry.
I just wanted to see
if I was still as good at it
as I used to be.
To see if I could still
smooth a little poison
over glass and polish it
to a diverting flash,
a mirror showing everything
but itself.
Forged Medieval German Church Fresco with Clandestine
Marlene Dietrichbr>
after Lothar Malskat (1913-1988)
…Malskat was outraged when no one believed that he had painted what seemed to be newly discovered medieval frescoes in a German church. Even when he pointed out the [anachronisms] he had inserted (a painting of a turkey which, being indigenous to North America, had not been seen in Europe in the Middle Ages, and a portrait of Marlene Dietrich, who definitely had not been seen in Europe in the Middle Ages), no one believed him.
-Noah Charney
You can hardly blame Malskat for making her
a small part of his fraud. She seemed to come
from a time before the third dimension
in portraiture was invented—all brusque
slashes of eyebrows, cheekbones, mouth.
As if she were meant to live only on surfaces
lit by fire or candlelight, smoke inscribing
its restless dialects across her forehead.
She was a brief kiss he blew to himself
while shaping the rest of the fake saints he’d claimed
to uncover after cleaning the true ones
on another wall, a little insurance in case he’d need
to later claim it all a joke, his painterly harm less
evil than the supercilious experts who’d burnished his lie.
Which is to say, a prop. A stolen bit of her face,
lunar and lonely, to better light his ego’s way.
Which is to say, for his love of himself, and not her
.
But didn’t she deserve, a little bit, to be used?
Didn’t she terrify us with the weight of our desire,
then fail us in being mortal? Didn’t she bring
her slow withering in the dark down on herself
with her own bitch-hand, grasping and ungovernable?
Beauty should always taste a bit of its own blood
and blame in its teeth. Shouldn’t she pay
for making us want? Listen to how our prayers
fill in the space of whatever she’d have chosen
to say. Tell me we don’t want all our goddesses
flattened and pinned to a wall, wings spread
and immobile. Tell me time doesn’t feed
on a woman face-first. Tell me we don’t love
her expression when she sees she can’t
get out of the killing jar.
