The gerrymandered fawn. The pig carved into blobs and slabs,
truant from a butcher’s guidebook. The flamingo, a coral awning
and titian shadow crushed against its side. I wanted to call it art:
cutting a cornsilk isthmus through ponding syrup, a grizzly’s pelt.

But I knew it was not. It is not that curators embargo the leprous
pegasus and the cobblestone giraffe. It is that beauty is not what
we report to, as recruits to duty; it is that the dab hand told to paint
by a rigid legend—two cornflower, three navy—is not a synesthete.