Poetry / Magnus Briar
:: How Natural It Looks ::
Lepus townsendii, the label reads, though the ink omits the hands, omits October, the razor cleaving the belly seam without a tremor. Anchored at the hip, nickel rod threaded through where the pelvis had grated against the socket. Clinched at the jugular notch, where she [methodical, deliberate, the final preparator under the lamp] tamped excelsior into the chest cavity until the hide stretched taut. Ten years since the borax dry-cured the fat. Ten years since the steel calipers measured the nostrils to the bone, calibrated for display, declared clean. A slower absolution. Every reliquary needs a skin that stopped moving. Suspended in the leap that isn’t a leap anymore, the armature setting the spine at forty-five degrees, mid-air forever. Glass eyes don’t dilate. The docent says look at the pelt, how natural, her breath fogging the pane. Beneath the surface, fine-gauge wire binds the ribs to the cedar block. Count the pins in the ears. Where the jawline met the neck, a gap of three millimeters where the hide declined a close: clamped, clamped, clamped, the sanctuary vibrating with caught muscle, the wire taut, the wire—
:: Last Call at the Wagon Wheel ::
Neon buzzes B-flat, off-key with the jukebox mangling the song about rivers and rings again for the taxidermy elk. The bartender polishes a glass down to a razor edge. A Diet Coke breeds its own frost against the laminate beside the longnecks. Salt-lick reek, spilled Bud, perfume of a peach three days dead in a leather purse. My hip against the bar rail, chin tipped. The disco ball mints legal tender out of dust, throwing cold coins across every face angled elsewhere, and the one angled here. Her voice idles on three cylinders. Her mouth, a salt mine. She observes me with the slow rot of a fuse. God, to be torn open by the local jaw, her palm weighing at my lumbar, two rites donning each other’s skin. The bridge hits [I’d drive through fire, baby] and the room sings it back, a choir of wet Carhartts. Sequins and sawdust. A cowboy hat passed as a collection plate. An ex weeping over a basket of crinkle-cut fries, tending the manger. Last call. The bartender flips the chrome legs skyward, kills the neon letter by letter: WAGON, then WHEEL, leaving the buzzing O to swallow the ceiling. Out in the lot, prairie sky stretched, a black-velvet-Elvis portrait. Her kiss is a wire live in the dirt. Behind us, the sign confessing O, O, O into the bed of an idling Ford. I taste ice and Marlboro and ten years of teeth clicked shut. My ribs un-latch. A jaw un-domesticated steps out of the sternum, chews the ignition keys, and eats the dark whole.
From the writer
:: Account ::
The body is an object in perpetual motion. Whether undergoing medical and gender transformation, decomposing in the dying orbit of a satellite, or navigating a bar sober, it moves. This is the central preoccupation of these poems: exploring those moments when rigid language—scientific, archival, or procedural—suddenly snaps under the pressure of intense human emotion.
These two poems explore displacement and preservation without offering a reassuring or tidy neatness. In How Natural It Looks, taxidermy is examined as a violent liturgy of containment: a shadow-visual for trans survival, surgical alteration, and the existential dread of being “declared clean.”
Last Call at the Wagon Wheel shifts radically into a metamorphic state governed by dream logic. I wanted to write about queer desire and sobriety, two themes close to my heart, by setting the scene in a small-town bar at closing time, a moment when the atmosphere physically changes around the body.
Across both pieces, as in much of my work, I aim for a fusion of the regional and the mythic, the technical and the surreal, the complex and the tender.
Magnus Briar (they/them) is a poet based in Winnipeg, Canada. Their work blends the regional and the mythic, exploring themes of displacement, grief, and recovery. Their poetry has been accepted into Funicular, Showcase, County Lines, and others.