After
Stephen Sexton
A little girl with frilled pink socks
and daisies in her braids
crawls into the stump of a plastic tree
to say a gleeful hello!
to all the dead dears inside.
Hello
hedgehog!
Hello
little mouse!
Hello
mister owl!
Fairy doors open
to reveal a stuffed finch on plastic
moss
and a field mouse
hiding its glass eyes
from the sticky fingers of children.
Everything
here is for touching
a curator sings,
Snow White with an electronic security
pass
on the third floor of the Ulster Museum
a princess of taxidermy
and plastic play sets.
Low to the ground
three fox cubs are curled together
behind plexi glass
eyes glued shut
like a stillborn cerberus.
This is where the little girl
with frilled pink socks
and pinch-red cheeks wonders,
for the first time,
why the animals lay so still
and silent.
everything
here is for touching
the
living and the dead
and
the in between
This thought does not linger;
a bushy tail hangs like a feather duster
in the playhouse,
the girl plays tug-of-war with the
plastic tree
reaches to pet the hedgehog and squeals
at the spines
scraping her flesh-ripe palm
before running to mummy.
Everything
here is for touching.
Everything,
Everything,
Everything.
Erin Emily Ann Vance (MA Creative Writing) is a
fiction writer and poet. She attended the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry
summer course at Queen's University Belfast in 2018, and a will be a fellow of
Summer Literary Seminars in Nairobi in December 2018. A recipient of the
Alberta Foundation for the Arts Young Artist Prize in 2017, and a finalist for
the 2018 Alberta Magazine Awards for fiction, her work has appeared in many
magazines and journals, including filling station and Contemporary Verse 2. She
has a chapbook with Lofton8th press and a leaflet with The Blasted Tree. Her
first novel will be released by Stonehouse Publishing in Fall 2019.
the
Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
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