The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Challenges
    • Challenge Archives
  • Ebooks
  • Prizes
  • Book Shelf
    • TERcets Podcast
  • The Ekphrastic Academy
  • Give
  • Submit
  • Contact
  • About/Masthead

Taxidermy Girls, by Lorette C. Luzajic

12/3/2020

0 Comments

 

Taxidermy Girls
 
after Joel Peter Witkin
 
1. The pale one, gaunt and green. Just walked out of an Otto Dix painting, but her girlfriend is even uglier. Her Mad Hatter headgear and bruised pupils have their own currency, but her waddle is Humpty Dumpty, or Twiddle Dum Dee. She is doughy and dumpy, rolly and lumpy, with hirsute arms and stubby paws. I like her immediately. 
 
2. Although she looks fifty, I know she is only half my age. When I was her, I tried, too, to be as odious as possible, shaved the sides of my head, and then all of it. Wore a flowing turquoise peasant mumu and combat boots. 
 
3. They are selling fox paw pendants, rings with teeth, and itty bitty exoskeletons of rare insects. I hold up a brooch of claws and copper wire, try it on my lapel, lay it back in its bed of ribbons and stones. An open jaw relic glimmers with skinny silver chains. I picture the pair of them out treasure hunting in the moors, excavating dead things from under roots and boulders, cold graves. 
 
4. The Jack Sprat one has kohl-sunk eyes. Turns them on a new customer. The wife who could eat no lean scoops up a bleached bone, tells me to hold it to my throat. I feel that wild thing ignite behind my thyroid butterfly, that sense of immensity and power that only death can stir.
 
5. I ask her how she came to be interested in dead things. She wasn’t, she says, until she met her girlfriend. The tall one has a PhD in insect taxidermy. She herself is finishing her masters degree in human neuroscience. I’m impressed. I buy the lynx necklace. It feels like a wishbone in my palm.
 
6. Most moments you forget, but some you remember. The first kiss with M. The last line of cocaine. Seeing Bobby Martin saunter up the drive the day he died a thousand miles away. And this one: the moment I took a man’s brain out of a Tupperware and held it in my hands. There were thirteen corpses in the medical morgue that afternoon. I was a visitor, a witness to the students’ human dissection. But all the oozing juice and lipid drips could not distract me from the epic hush of that hunk of dense plasticine. All of the dendrites and synapses were silent, the whole of a life was reduced to a putty mass pumped full of Fermaldehyde. Even so, you could tell: this was rare physical contact with someone’s actual engine. My hands were cupping the seat of the soul.  
 
7. My fixation with death started early. I had to make my peace with the mechanics of murder and the reality of temporality. I was a highly sensitive child, noticed it everywhere, in between the electric sparks of living. I couldn’t let it fell me, so I became fascinated instead. A girl I loved was gang raped and strangled at seventeen. A girl I knew had to get away from her father. Tied a tender knot around her neck, slipped from a backyard cherry tree alongside its blossoms. That was just the beginning.
 
8. It was what Mother was always threatening to do, but never did. 
 
9. I would stand like a shadow in the doorway and try to reach her, listen to her howl and keen like the ducks she felled on our farm, in the seconds before their silence.
 
7. The flesh grows weary. Barely middle aged, and I’m already old. I repent of all I did, on purpose by mistake, to poison myself, to stop living. God forgave me, but my body won’t. 
 
8. Still, after giving up everything else, I can’t give up the wine. It’s the only thing that feels like blood.
 
9. In an ancient Maya cemetery, the week of my art exhibition in the Yucatan, Manuel and I took pictures of the rusty tin boxes giving up their ghosts. There were bones everywhere, skulls propped under vines, leaves blooming in their sunken sockets. It was so hot and humid, and so strange, it was as if I was under water.
 
10. Witkin used the same things as we did at the graveyard, for his photographs, the same things as the taxidermy girls, as the doctors in the laboratory morgue. Dead things, and the living dead, arranged, sutured, assembled. He had to work in Mexico, where the things he needed for his images were not illegal. Heads, limbs, eyeballs. His black and white medleys of scars and sadomasochism, lard and lust, blood and dust are harrowing, and beautiful. I usually detest shock value art, dismiss it for being too easy. But there is something compelling and compulsive in his grim tableaus. Authenticity? Maybe.  Something essentially Catholic. Something pure. They are gelatin-filmed, and macabre, but feel close to the truth.
 
11. The artist says his works are closer to the Beatitudes than to snuff. 
 
12. When he was five, he witnessed a car crash. In the noise and excitement and terror, he found perfect stillness as a rolling stone tumbled through the chrome and steel shards and landed beside his innocence: the eyes of a pretty little girl stared back at him, unblinking. Just her head, shredded asunder from the rest of her. It was one of those defining moments you don’t choose but never forget. Her absolute loneliness.
  

Lorette C. Luzajic

There is no accompanying image to this piece because all of the photographer's images are incredibly disturbing. It is up to the reader whether they want to look up the works. They are gruesome and shocking and show decay, death, deformity, illness, sex, and pornography. 

This poem was first published at South Florida Poetry Review, and in Pretty Time Machine: ekphrastic prose poems (Mixed Up Media Editions, 2020).

Lorette C. Luzajic is an award-winning, internationally collected visual artist with works in more than 25 countries. She studied journalism in university but prefers creative writing, often about art. Her most recent of five poetry collections is Pretty Time Machine: ekphrastic prose poems. She recently won first place in a flash fiction contest at MacQueen's Quinterly, and has been nominated several times each for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her poems and very short stories have been widely published, including recent or forthcoming appearances in Bright Flash, Club Plum, Halfway Down the Stairs, Gyroscope, Free Flash Fiction, Communicators League, and more. She is the founder and editor of The Ekphrastic Review.
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    The Ekphrastic Review
    Picture
    Current Prompt
    Picture
    COOKIES/PRIVACY

    This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies.

    Opt Out of Cookies
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Join us: Facebook and Bluesky
    @ekphrasticreview.



    ​
    ​Archives
    ​

    June 2025
    May 2025
    April 2025
    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015

    Lorette C. Luzajic [email protected] 

  • The Ekphrastic Review
  • The Ekphrastic Challenges
    • Challenge Archives
  • Ebooks
  • Prizes
  • Book Shelf
    • TERcets Podcast
  • The Ekphrastic Academy
  • Give
  • Submit
  • Contact
  • About/Masthead