Taxidermy

I use every color in the box
to draw the scenes my father’s
newsprint voice sends wafting
across the table my hands
can’t refixate fast enough
to capture the novel’s action
left to right the rabbits leap
across my page like a flipbook
of their story only the highlights
later Dan who’s been known to
see more in the movement of the stars
than most asks what animal
were you born under
I say my dad and I
we’re the same
he says that makes sense
rabbits are the gentle creatures
of the zodiac
but we had to grow into
our gentleness stuffed
the space between us with cotton built
ourselves a carcass that always
looks like it just stopped
running we’re so soft now
that reaching out we can’t feel
the calluses on each other’s hands we hear
only a slight tap in the cushion
someone knocking to get out

Anthem

It’s too late and we walk
through Union Station.
It is marble & cardboard & crime scene tape. The yellow,

the red blue sounds of sirens—
and I look up into the vaulted hall.

Roman soldiers gaze down—
their blank-eyed search, the breath of our dead on my neck.

Someone is singing nearby,

past the shops with their shutters
and padlocks. The stone echoes

the voice, steps, and the sobs

of the woman bent over that ATM And she is the only thing
I understand in this new-world excavation.

I crouch
against the railing, too long

before the bus leaves, and I wish we were chiseled,
each of us here, into something
that would last

but that wouldn’t mean anything after enough time.

Empty & eternal & we could stay for a while, right? Without thinking too hard
about whether we belong.

I look a bit like a gargoyle already, how I’m squatting,
still in a way that says
I have been too tired for too long,

and why not? We need better guards
and I’m good at seeing things I shouldn’t.

But I leave because I can and I worry mostly
that I won’t sleep on the bus.

Or I will, and I’ll regret it,
waking in the dim confusion
of a Virginia gas station

and peeling, pounding, my head from the window’s smudge.

All last night while we came here,
the guys behind us screamed terrible things about people and places

I didn’t know, but wanted to because I felt that they were like me,
and whatever they did to deserve being exposed

to this bus full of waking people
who don’t want to hear about it

is something I could have done.

and I wanted to yell why are you doing this
but I was afraid to know.

To admit that I do. I didn’t come here for
any reason. In the morning I’ll sleep
or two hours and then go to work.
I don’t want to ask about that. I want to
ask what
there is. to sing for when instead you could scream.

Marina Greenfeld is a poet and editor living in Carrboro, North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Cellar Door and The Daily Tar Heel. In 2019, she was the winner of the Blanche Armfield Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the Whitman Bicentennial Poetry Contest. She's worked for Southern Cultures as an editorial assistant, Cellar Door as poetry editor, and Copper Canyon Press as an intern. Marina recently completed a poetry thesis at UNC Chapel Hill, and currently works for the Parr Center for Ethics, an interdisciplinary home for moral inquiry at UNC.