Taxidermy

The country fox in the window
is a scab torn off by the house.
She is charmed awake in the light,
pale vapors of San Francisco.

I trot down the hill, spooked,
noting gallery walls and so
many tampons discarded. Relic
rooftops, darling carvings on a

coast of bitcoin and plants. The fox
cannot serve as guardian. And
gold, crouched over the sidewalk,
is exposed like a cereal prize.

But of course her life is over—
rattled bone, how she leans as if
to pounce. Even she cannot bear
to undo it. The thrum of my

Reeboks, hot rain on a glass, her’s
hoarded by incubation. Don’t
look away from this story—when
she started to move, they shot her. 

*

Kayleigh Norgord is an MFA graduate of the University of California Davis, where she won the Graduate Writing Prize in poetry. Her work has appeared in The Potomac Review and Illumination Journal, among others. Her awards include a Tomales Bay Writing by Writers Fellowship, a Eudora Welty award for best collection, a Celeste Turner Wright Award for poetry, and a Henry Douglas Mackaman Writers award for best short story. She lives in Oakland.