Field Guide
By Shaylah Kloska
1. Hands and Animals
The man will invite you in.
He will beckon with hands that you will examine
and decide whether they are lovely
or crude, and which is preferred.
The man will argue on the side of change.
He will defend the scars he has scratched into your body.
He is thinking it is only wood.
2. You will talk about crime in the alleys and the names of animals.
But the animals have gone. They are there
in the Field museum,
arranged by man to look as though they have
no memory of death.
Man mends the ripping seams,
sweeps the artificial field.
3. The Field
Houses are in the field, the doe
and the possums
bloody the thoroughfares,
food for the scavengers. The red-tailed hawks
that are everywhere now.
4. Hands
Men don’t know their hands that stretched the hide for shelter
before the rot sank in.
The dripping ceiling.
You decide his hands are
mechanic now, soft and
bleached,
white as bone.
Shaylah Kloska lives in Logan Square in Chicago, Illinois. Her prose has appeared in The Pedestal Magazine. She plays and sings in two bands, Buffalo Heart and Chaperone.
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