Skinned humans preserved by liquid plasticine,
their internal everlastingly without, their muscles
and ligaments shined and posed perpetually in
the mundane movings of what it had meant to be mobile—
lurching forward, poised to throw a ball to first,
or torso twisted like Myron’s bronze discus
thrower. A woman opening her abdominal tissue as if
to sell a stolen watch, instead exposing a folded fetus.
A man skinned of all but a face, extending his right arm
with what once was the rest of his skin draped over
a clothes-hanger like long underwear. The gallery smelled
of mortification, of woe for the humans-turned-
statue, of distrust this was their choice. Was the flesh
sculpture with left palm flattened skyward, right arm raising
a conductor’s baton, eternally seeking crescendo
once a prisoner of war? Or did he die of pneumonia
in a Chinese hospital’s indigent ward? Was the vertical
slice of a man high-fiving his own other half once plucking
stars in a garden with Falun Gong? Is there somewhere
a Chinese mother whose son suddenly stopped writing,
and might she now clip a coupon from a hotel lobby brochure
to visit the sinew of him in a St. Louis shopping mall
standing in a wide X, his intestines unwound and suspended
before him like the tail of an ever-escaping kite?