Museum of a Museum
by Scout Allen
Dead Zoo with eyes vigilant and lips pulled back showing perfect pointless teeth. A fish from 1852 I have never seen before, no plaques tell me what’s extinct and since when, or until when. Truncated sunfish with fins cocked vertical and taller than I, so round, mouth shocked agape. Three black antlered skeletons facing down the door. “Mute swan” hovers forever, inches above its egg in a little painted box. Golden Eye; cast of Lumpsucker; Dragonet resined. Basking shark twenty-feet-short, suspended by thin wires from the ceiling, white plastic wrapped around its middle like a bandage but with a little bow and I can still see the tear in its skin and something wooden inside. Puffins on a fake cliffside dripping with fake shit and broken eggs; cast of Pouting, milky-eyed, cataracted even through whatever death preservation is. Brittle stars; bramble shark, just the top half, extruding in a silent scream straight out of the wall. MONKFISH or ANGEL. Two hedgehog adolescents just laying crescent-limp, unposed, facing each other but away from me, on the bottom of the display seemingly forgotten, allowed to rest, resigned to perception, togetherness.
Scout Allen is a queer Jewish poet hailing from Appalachian North Carolina, with a background in ecology. They reflect on reclamations of youth, and navigate the whimsy and horror of everyday life through examinations of the mundane and delighting in ephemerality. They currently reside in Alaska chasing feathers down the street.