Ice Age Megafauna Haunt Our Dreams
because we lived among them for millennia: those (almost)
nightmares you have of immense bears roaming the hallways
& of Scimitar Cats you can’t see but can definitely sense on
the roof are just as much proof of it as the pendants recently
unearthed in Brazil, the ones hand-made from the polished
ostederms of Megatheium―the mild Giant Ground Sloth,
tractor-sized, roaming the old Americas, clawing huge tunnels
in the yielding Eocene clay; just as much proof as
saber teeth untangled from some Cro-Magnon’s rictal fist.
Or auroch herds in ochre miles down the dark, or
the small human bones, hyena-cracked, in Quartz, Nebraska.
They say young children dream mostly of animals.
Of their warm snag-heavy pelts. Their swamp breath in the dark―
Emerging from our crevices in the swiftly melting glaciers, we
came together to hunt them. We grew ever more clever
on slabs of their gristle & tissue, picking our flint from their ribs,
sucking marrow from the bones of their tenderest young―
Figure A is a Pleistocene foal charred by fire. Figure B a tiny
flute carved from its femur―thus they vanished from the steppes:
Osteoborus to proto-bison, Castor to mammoth, all gone.
In dreams I can still see their faint lozenged souls rising up
from industrial swamps, from the quarries & golf ponds
& sea beds thick with polymer & bad algae, rising all over
the recreant dawn. Can you see them? Forsaking us,
forsaking their bones―leaving ribbons of spine & knuckle
archipelagos, leaving their carbon to burn on the earth.
Next Door
A hundred eyes & one darkness― Ovid, Metamorphoses
Living on window-stunned doves is permitted, but
No loose dogs. No anonymous beekeeping. Nor
In the vacant lot. Rinse out your glass. No
Tiki thatch or blocking the sidewalk with bunk beds
& crutches, no exhorting your neighbors to ditch
Their sparse grass. No weed or invoking of plague
Or carpet moths in Spring. No burning. Vigilance is key.
Know we are daily assailed by strangers with wrenches
For hands. For spite they turn the faucets on full-blast.
They flee their household gods. Keep an eye out
For those squatters in loose pants, souls of the dead hid
In crow-skin, narcosis in all its disguises. Dear Neighbor
If our doorbell camera should flicker don’t mind it:
It’s only neuralgia. In the spirit of fruitful future exchanges
On the Egress of Mercury, on Dread, Grief & Terror,
We sincerely indeed we most desperate say Welcome―
Amy Beeder’s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Nation, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, and most recently in Sixth Finch and AGNI. Her third book, And So Wax Was Made & Also Honey, was published by Tupelo Press in 2021. She is an editor at Plume and teaches in Albuquerque.