Caitlin Scarano & Zack Medlin
Rogue Taxidermy
The dead can be anything you want
with a needle and a little catgut
stitching, lifeless reenactments of life:
a jackalope, a mermaid, a man
and a woman labeled a marriage
by the curator of Ripley’s. Did we
ever believe it? A tangled knot
of greasy hair and acrylic eyes
almost alive—as if, in that one photo
that remains of their wedding day,
we could almost smell her fear,
musty as resewn fur. She split
her stitches, spilt her blood
-stained saw-dust insides,
onto the cold fleshing table,
prepared her body to be sewed,
not anew so much as to another.
But this time she called it her
choosing. Hovering over her, his
wingspan perpetual, pinned back.
Through bone preparation, wire
weaving, there are many ways
to waste a life, or enshrine it. Years
later, we are children. We pay
our money to gawk at a cobbled-
together rabbit and pronghorn deer
in a tattered tent filled with bodies
barely kept together by the sideshow
shadows not dark enough to hide all
the seams. The pale antlers branching
like bone memories from her hair
were the only real things ever there.
Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. Her second full-length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize, won a 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award, and was a finalist for the WA State Book Award. She was recently selected as the winner of CutBank’s 2024 Genre Contest in Poetry and won LitMag’s 2024 Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction.
Zack Medlin is a writer living in Fort Smith, Arkansas. His debut poetry collection, Beneath All Water, was selected by Bob Hicok as the winner of the Marystina Santiestevan First Book Prize. He holds an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, a PhD from the University of Utah, and is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Arkansas – Fort Smith.