Pry Apart a Single Pane
Avatars
Clockwork Girl at the Opera
Essay Breathless in A World of Cloud And Smoke
Grid God
Happy Pills
I Know the Science of the Thing:
Industry Lap Dog
Interim
Knives
Labor
Not From Around Here
Perfect Horses
Spring
Standing Between My Parents at Manatee Lagoon
That Dark Center
The Animals We Go to War With
The Memory Gardener
Yes
That Dark Center
Lisa Rosinsky
At the end of the exhibit—past the pair
of stuffed cheetahs in mid-leap,
amputees jogging across a screen
on carbon-fiber legs in thirty-
second loops, past the fluttering edge
of the manta ray, dolphin flippers
with their ghosts of finger-bones—she lurks
beneath carnelian spotlights.
Another casting of the skull sits at ground-
level; I peer through it from behind,
standing where thick neck muscle
would’ve swiveled, find myself
face-to-face with a boy staring back at me
through stalagmite teeth. For a moment
I could swear it’s you, decades younger,
and the wanting hits me hard:
to carry, curled inside me… He races off toward
footprints spaced to show
the Rex’s thirty-foot stride,
the full set of bones, suspended,
xylophone tail aloft. I try to picture
the chaos of this beast being
mounted, the size of the eggs that slid
out of her into a mud nest. Eyeballs
big as my fist, twitching behind
leather lids, sky darkening. Nothing here
tells us we must change, only that we have
so little time. That pelvic bone
hanging like an unswung hammer.
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of stuffed cheetahs in mid-leap,
amputees jogging across a screen
on carbon-fiber legs in thirty-
second loops, past the fluttering edge
of the manta ray, dolphin flippers
with their ghosts of finger-bones—she lurks
beneath carnelian spotlights.
Another casting of the skull sits at ground-
level; I peer through it from behind,
standing where thick neck muscle
would’ve swiveled, find myself
face-to-face with a boy staring back at me
through stalagmite teeth. For a moment
I could swear it’s you, decades younger,
and the wanting hits me hard:
to carry, curled inside me… He races off toward
footprints spaced to show
the Rex’s thirty-foot stride,
the full set of bones, suspended,
xylophone tail aloft. I try to picture
the chaos of this beast being
mounted, the size of the eggs that slid
out of her into a mud nest. Eyeballs
big as my fist, twitching behind
leather lids, sky darkening. Nothing here
tells us we must change, only that we have
so little time. That pelvic bone
hanging like an unswung hammer.