Like Taxidermy
// Annie Przypyszny
Today I saw the body of a deer
at the edge of Canal Road, a classic example
of the doe-meets-car cliché.
Yes, it was pitiful,
and, yes, grotesque,
but the straight, rigor-mortis stiffness
of its legs made it seem fake
in its realness, like taxidermy—
not the noble, moose-head trophy kind
that you could swear just blinked at you,
but the amateur variety, where all sense
of the natural is wrung out
of the pelt and the face is just a bit too
sideways. Though I only caught
a quick glimpse of that rigid cervine husk
it managed to revive a memory
I can find no use for:
the years-ago trip to the science museum,
the anatomy exhibit with preserved organs
from cadavers. There, among other bodily artifacts,
a pair of smoker’s lungs, asphalt-black
and mottled, like a scorched chunk
of halibut. I knew the sight was intended
to disturb, to shove a slab of mortality
in my face like a plastinated PSA.
Yet there I stood,
staring down the grisly display,
not convinced that such un-pink lungs
could ever have breathed in the first place,
nor that dead was the right word.