Short Fiction
Poetry
1 min
Habitat Diorama (Spectacled Cormorant)
Hannah Rodabaugh
Now we have whole prisons dedicated to the lost. We
call these Habitat Dioramas, each painted scene cast
in bas-relief against an artificial stillness. Stuffed birds
in comical poses—a spectacled cormorant's neck bent
like a scythe—an erudite gesture of Dinosauria before
badly-painted water and lush forest. The dead awash in
exposure as photogenic negative—unwilling as in flux—
the reverse of film's intention. These look-alikes cannot
stand in for the living no matter how much we try to
make them—not even as apologia or placard for our
guilt. The scenery cannot take us from this statuary to
something moving, cannot breathe the salt air over us,
the sea wailing beyond us; it will not get us to remember
something lost. When an animal is lost, it's lost forever.
The museum becomes an unlikely cemetery for all our
buried hopes, all the worlds we couldn't save. The words
we could have said to them unspoken in our throat.
Habitat Diorama (Spectacled Cormorant) was selected for MSUL’s themed call for work about Water, in coordination with the MSU Broad Art Museum’s fall 2023 exhibition, Flint is Family in Three Acts, featuring the photography of Latoya Ruby Frazier.
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