ISSUE 2
 

Erick Verran

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Untitled

 

In this collector’s gallery, the large skulls

of early Britons debate in an airless glass

 

rectangle. 

                  It is a musty reliquary of stuff:

the charcoal study of a kidney, the horse

 

dissected across a flush of cabinet cards,

a beautiful cross section of a chanterelle

 

under magnification (to show the funnel

of gills, yellow as turmeric), a tall carpet

 

thought to be Moroccan in origin, colors

rotted away by the sun’s infernal rounds,

 

and a boxy, six-stringed crwth, the kind

of lyre one bowed, innovated by a Celtic

 

tradesman dead for centuries, but hung

casually, as though it remained playable.

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