“The Two-Headed Calf”
by Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this
freak of nature, they will wrap his body
in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north
field with his mother. It is a perfect
summer evening: the moon rising over
the orchard, the wind in the grass. And
as he stares into the sky, there are
twice as many stars as usual.

—from Gilpin’s book The Hocus-Pocus of the Universe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1977), 59.