Previous Issue: Spring/Summer 2010

Skinned Mammals
Virginia Bell

Squirrel Season (1987), one of Sally Mann's photographs of her son Emmett

In the storefront windowsof restaurants in Spainskinned rabbits hang

above cazuelas of pluckedchickens nesting in lemons& naked toes of garlic.

Whether rabbits or alley cats
more easily snared, someonehad to skin them &

someone had to learn to skin.
An old man in Kansasteaches young boys

to sack & sink unwanted litters
of mammals. His handsare tight, his face

rhubarb at the absence
of his own son; there areparks surely, or places

where a boy might just
eat a pear. But also wherea boy named Emmett

alone with a knife might
poke below a squirrel’slimp lip, & just because

finding that he could, peel it
back and back, unleashingbright color & slick

liquid over the hardening
body. Emmett nowholds two of them

as required props behind
squared off glass, alongwith his own open

dull mouth, eyes, forehead
& brows unsureof what his holding

two skinned mammals
is supposedto mean.

Virginia Bell is an associate editor with RHINO Magazine and an adjunct professor at Loyola University Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in A Writers’ Congress: Chicago Poets on Barack Obama’s Inauguration, Ekphrasis, Woman Made Gallery’s Her Mark 2009, Contrary Magazine, Beltway Poetry Quarterly and The Innisfree Poetry Journal.