Jacqueline West
WITH THE FIVE-YEAR-OLD AT THE BELL MUSEUM
We bring you here to see dead things—
green moth wings pinned beneath glass bells,
bones ranged in drawers like silver spoons,
rows of limp pelts slit from their flesh.
Your fingers slip through silver fur.
Around the corner, whooping cranes
pose on impossible legs, forever
dancing, forever still. No dust collects
on their outspread wings. Grandest of all,
the mastodon, long gone, still standing
on its plaster stones, great tusks framing
your small self. Your smile. The boxes
of minor specimens: extinct pigeons,
endangered wolves, owls with their gold
glass eyes casting back your captured face.
No, we say. They don’t live here anymore.
We watch you skip to the next room,
your shadow a slash in the stillness,
your pulse a promise that you, unlike them,
will run and run and never stop.
Jacqueline West is a poet, novelist, and parent living in Minnesota. Her work has appeared in The Driftless Reader, Sugar House Review, Liminality, and Strange Horizons, and has garnered three Pushcart nominations and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Her books for younger readers include the NYT-bestselling series The Books of Elsewhere and the Minnesota Book Award-winning Long Lost. Find her at jacquelinewest.com or on IG at jacqueline.west.writes.