opisthotonic death pose

staring at her feels funny. funny in the casket of red velvet rope way, funny in the presentation of our findings way, the mirror way, the humiliation way. it’s the i know you’s preceding the differentiation. she’s been dead for sixty-six million years. her jaws rusted open, head thrown back, inevitably curving the spine, nerveless, attracting men who harden pathetically easily at curvatures of similar pretenses. they think she died of natural causes. i think she’s god. i think of the woman holding her baby up in front of the painting of the woman holding her baby. i turn my head upside down to see if i get the same revelation in understanding. the museum guide says they discovered her in the limestone beds of Southern Germany. i ask if he meant that she donated her body to science. i ask if she would have rather died in fetal position. he says he can’t answer for her. i say he’s been doing just that. he says my questions appertain to a different building, try the museum of art. i think he is confusing my inquiries for interpretative theories. ancient animals that carried eggs sixty-six million years ago are often just hollow calcium and pomewater. the parasaurolophus hides her young in the molten womb of the earth. the archaeopteryx dies sixty-six million years beforehand where nobody will ever find her. the diplodocus rots beneath falling stars. birds of heaven die in baptismal pangea; live to haunt halls of glass and signage. metaphors carve the notches in her vertebrae: to die to provide to self-paralyze to entertain to fossilize to oxidize to rot to comply to do it silently. she says only a meteor could outperform me.

Devin Veilleux is an English major at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is currently working on finishing her bachelor's in English and will move on to a master's, with hopes for a doctorate following in later years with plans to teach creative writing and the study of literature.