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52 Moose Head Mounted on the Wall of Big Pappa’s Barbeque Joint His form half-disappeared like the hind legs of your childhood. Like its hooves. The moose—whose body is now a stone fireplace with a smokedover hole at the heart—stares elsewhere. One glance at his glass eyes sets your trigger finger twitching. It’s not a gun snug against your thigh, just your pulse that holsters a memory: that boy with the fetish who’d beg to suck your eyeball. You’d offer the roll of your right eye, then the left one’s plush. His tongue tipped with nicotine flicked your veins a wilder red. You did this, sitting on the brick wall of the abandoned bread factory as scattered pigeon spines vertebraed the mapleleaf viburnum. The flock once flooded the chain-linked ryegrass among blue dumpsters, cooing for crusts. Now the kick of vinegar sours up from the coral sauce on your rack of ribs, and you sit with your past’s camouflage sliding off in drops like a season. Like the one the moose head remembers, which is why the hunters must’ve craned his neck to the right before they stuffed it. A light snowfall, a starveling ginkgo. So he wouldn’t scare off customers with the snipe of his stare. So they hung him there, the rest of him invisible. Who knows how long he’s looked back. ...

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