Michelle Sinsky

The Carnivores Have Resurfaced

Understand the cold season. Take both bones in your hands and rub them together to make water. Soup results, but the broth is thin. Rest knowing there will be more-- little soup means little skin and eventually, more bones. Quails step out of their feathers and back into them. Peacocks spare themselves, robes trailing. O why, crow, would anyone want to be such a bird when demand is on the rise for penguin stew, finch pudding? No one here knows definitively. More owls ask the question. Lyrebirds grind their beaks in imitation like chainsaws. Kaleidoscope flight patterns press into to the sky like foam. Just ignore the flightless ones, dinosaur descendants, their feet hammered to the ground. If they were meant to run, they would not have been plucked for eggs, plucked for feathers, from hatches or holes where they hide their heads. How would one of these brontosaurs manage to escape the low shoulders of a tiger, perched in a tree, sunk into its muscles, drooling gold? Great kitchen smells waft in bursts from their dens-- you can hear the sharpening of knives. For you, I’ll ration the best pieces. Every red slice coughed up for your carpet mouth. Defeather their terrycloth trains, tar their down with an oily beurre blanc. Could your stomach hold enough to last the winter months, love? Because we both know no one can preserve a parakeet like I can. And no one can quite salt a canary’s wing, or kill and boil a killdeer. Zebra waxbills are imprecise without a bouillon and they’ll put stripes on your chest done correctly. You leave this den and who will season a swallow for you like I can? Exactly! no one. Weather will creep in like robins in the flue. Very few will sear a magpie like I do.

Michelle Sinsky is an interdisciplinary artist and MFA in Writing candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has appeared recently in Midwestern Gothic, elimae, Red Lightbulbs, Metazen, ANOBIUM, and others, and in collaborative works at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Academy of Fine Arts, Prague. Her costumes will be featured on Dorothea Lasky's upcoming Thunderbird tour with Wave Books starting this October. She reads for Gigantic Sequins Literary Journal, translates French, and works, among other places, as an arts criticism editor and contributor.