Sarah Elkins
Sarah Elkins lives in southern West Virginia. Her work is forthcoming from or has appeared in Cimarron Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Quarterly West, Baltimore Review, West Trestle Review, Porter House Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. Featured in Verse Daily and recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Sarah holds an MFA from Pacific University. Find her at SarahElkins.com.
Suburban Taxonomy of the Moose with a Line From the Talking Heads
My catty-corner neighbor
erected a life-sized, rusted tin moose
at the edge of her lawn where it zeroes
my backyard. The past three mornings,
I’ve double-took this two-dimensional bull
for an alpha buck, indigenous white tail,
sporting an out-of-season rack
in the late April fog of the Anthropocene
we call the vague now. Algonquin
for eater of twigs, English for giant mammal
who would stomp your brains out
if given half a chance, who has never once
loped among these Appalachian conifers,
not wandered this range presently subdivided
and HOA’d as Greenbrier Pines, not in
the Pleistocene nor before. English for beast
who should be more feared than the grizzly
but isn’t thanks to L.L. Bean socks,
flannel sheets, and this yard ornament.
Meanwhile, the fat ticks waiting in the grass
do not care what name they’ll give the next epoch
coursing, even now, in their tiny grenade bodies,
in everything except this watchful moose that,
if it could, would say, This is not my beautiful house.
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