To look sexy in security footage, emulate

cave art; the painting with the disemboweled bison,

 

its hunter thin and lying on undefined earth.

We have named everything and it’s still not

 

better—every discovered fish, the range of human

emotion, each maneuver with a car. I stand

 

in the sun and discuss with friends the process

of aging, how we hover like fruit flies around

 

ourselves, searching for signs of decay.

When modeling for an introductory art class,

 

unfurling myself like a country, I wondered

for the first time if the painting was fantasy:

 

that perhaps there has always been fiction, the bison

running back to the herd unharmed, and the hunter

 

left in the near dark, curious about the planet

of pain and physicality. The students kept their eyes

 

low leaving class, and I pocketed the fifty

dollar bill, considering what I would break it on:

 

the reality of an object, its city of shadow and wells

of light. I thought of myself like a tunnel that guides

 

non-aquatic life through great bodies of water, functional

and empty, whose very being rests on the uncomfortable pinnacle

 

of disaster. There is life swirling around the barrier,

predating and, in the odd instance, being released.