--previously published in Animal Eye

Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious,
glass eye embedded in its slitted red, skin
husked and sealed forever in a vacuum–
the false gray sedge where no dog hunts
and it's lost its sleekness as it's lost its sun.

She ages terribly behind glass.
Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious,
so why should we admire or hate her,
husked and sealed forever in a vacuum,
the frozen attitude of cunning

strung over wire, razor nails replaced
and aging terribly behind glass?
Imagine the wounds she could tear into a body.
Why admire or hate her for them,
why not call her existence, simply, honest:

an animal practicing its craft designed by nature?
Now she's strung over wire, the razor nails replaced
with plastic as her forest was itself replaced
by us, the many wounds we've torn into its body.
Years ago, signs across the neighborhood

listing all the cats found mutilated declared
a man was busy practicing his craft, nature redesigned
by violence. We have to find the killer, they said,
before the forested park fills with bodies,
the cats turned into girls and the girls into women.

Months later, the signs were torn down, the notices
listing all the cats found mutilated declared
a mistake. The culprit was a fox. Now, behind glass
we've found the killer: the violence
we think we cannot be or feel more than,

the once-red body that fascinates us
labeled female, the signs beside it torn, notes
on its habitat in disarray due to construction.
The culprit is a fox. Behind glass
lighting flickers, throws down shadows so that
we cannot see her. She raises up a paw
and the once-red body that fascinates us
freezes in its shabby immortality, stands disfigured
in its habitat, in disarray due to our construction
of a world that keeps her always different from us;

in our imagination of ourselves, degraded.
We cannot see her. She raises up a paw
as if in supplication, cone nose tasting the air
frozen in its shabby immortality, disfigured
by the box we've locked it in, as we've locked in her,

imagining how she'd slip from the forest to drink
at a puddle of rain, the vision of herself degraded
by a car's headlights that cut across its surface.
She lifts her head, cone nose tasting the air
and the wind lifts too, riffling the grasses, the trees,

the fur at her throat; a movement which,
as she stops to drink at her puddle of rain,
could be herself, the wind or nothing: an absence
in the headlights that cut across the surface.
She looks into her puddle of rain

but will not imagine more, does not need to, like us,
a wind riffling through grasses, a movement
like water running down a glass room.
Nothing ever was this slinking, vicious.
She could be herself, the wind or nothing. Instead,
she's husked, red. Sealed forever in a vacuum.