Is a bone that would taste like a spiritual wafer on his tongue.

Let us imagine the servant ordered down on all fours

In the manner of an ottoman whereupon the boss volume

Of John James Audubon’s Birds of America can be placed.

Antebellum residents who possessed the most encyclopedic

Bookcases, luxurious armoires, and beds with ornate cotton

Canopies often threw the most photogenic dinner parties.

Long after they have burned to ash, the hound dog sits there

Mourning the succulent bones he believes the logs used to be.

Imagination is often the boss of memory. Let us imagine

Music is radiating through the fields as if music were reward

For suffering. A few of the birds Audubon drew are now extinct.

The Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, and Labrador duck

No longer nuisance the boss property. With so much

Furniture about, there are far fewer woods. Is furniture’s fate

As tragic as the fate of an ax, the part of a tree that helps

Bring down more upstanding trees? The best furniture

Can stand so quietly in a room that the room appears empty.

If it remains unbroken, it lives long enough to become antique.

RECONSTRUCTED RECONSTRUCTION

after Rebecca Campbell

Q:

A: The strange thing about the portraits was that sometimes from within the display case during my rounds as the night guardian (a part-time job), I could hear them singing to one another.

Q:

A: It was noise if you weren’t listening carefully enough, but the kind of noise you find in the woods behind a farmhouse—the noise of hooves stomping a cowbell into a bed of dry leaves. Who knew so much genre could come from sticks and air!

Q:

A: Your guess is good as mine. It may have only been the courthouse basement (where we kept our town’s old photos and whatnots) was haunted by a tambourine player and fiddler circa Whitman on the battlefield, a brother and sister name of Quincy and Adelaide.

Q:

A: Looking at them, there was no way of knowing whether they meant their expressions to be ironic or allegorical. The sister had a faint mustache and lovely white eyes.

Q:

A: I don’t think they were twins, but I’ll concede, you can do anything with makeup and lighting, and I don’t even know for sure that their tune was called “Quixotic Abolitions.” Where’d you hear that?

Q:

A: They had no children, but the woman couldn’t have had her tubes tied. It was against her godship and moreover it was the Reconstruction era!

Q:

A: I wouldn’t say that—I’ve got manners. He had no chickens and even less knowledge of you and me waiting down the road. His head was asymmetrical, his laughter made a strange pennies-in-a-tin sound when it came from his body, but no, no . . .

Q:

A: There’s nothing written about the town’s runners-up and third-stringers: Mr. and Mrs. Beauford Wood, who witnessed two, three dozen lynchings between them; Isaiah Davies, the thrice-married banker who supposedly owned one of Abraham Lincoln’s handkerchiefs; the boot-wearing widow, Martha Herman; Mr. and Mrs. Knot, who, being some manner of immigrant with no concept of the silent K, announced themselves as “Kinnot”—but that’s why I’m giving them a shout-out here. You should look into their stories.