after The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living by Damien Hirst for Carl Cotton, the first Black taxidermist of Chicago
In the video,
Carl Cotton swoops his scalpel
deftly and deliberately
into the flushed red
of a robin’s chest,
contemplates its ribs,
hollow as a winter day,
and coaxes bone from its
hardened sheath.
This flaying
is an act
of love.
To make vermin
into god,
oh, craftsman,
there were no other
Black taxidermists, history says.
It is a profession
for people white
as asbestos and cruelty
with a degree to match.
But is it not
a Black profession
to make who would
otherwise
be buried in history
stay alive and soaring
forever?
To softly gut the lacuna of a being
only trustful in death,
it is a Black artform
to tend the wilted sorghum
of this marshland
and tell us
come see,
this morgue
I have made
into stage.
This exhibit
I can make
of mourning.
This monument
I can make
of bone.

Azura Tyabji is a poet and organizer hailing from Seattle, Washington and author of Stepwell (Poetry Northwest, 2018). She was the 2018-19 Seattle Youth Poet Laureate and National Youth Poet Laureate Ambassador for the West region of the US. Azura writes from the convergence of her Black and Indian identities anand strives to develop and lend her voice to movements for liberation. She is a 13th cohort First Wave Scholar at the University of Madison, Wisconsin.