what’ll it eat? reindeer
lead you to sleepless summer nights,
the forest soon generating enough milk & meat
to begin breeding rich allergies
to hay & cities
& if the climate changes faster
than the sexual norms?
a coastline may drown while
prophylactic methods wash into the moon’s phases,
forcing families onto higher ground
littered with antlers & nanotubes,
a new lonely place created from
an incentive to reproduce not on paper (so
how old are these trees? these tweens
fresh from the nursery
growing taller & more or less punky?)
greenhouse gases are an experimental brew
scenting a teen’s breath on arrival home,
high on eco-slang, a virtual chase
staked out between a stump & a future family
made from who knows what
this life might be wanting?
fire? ice? or who can say, a sperm
en route to conjunction
with an ovum waiting for conjunction
with (snipped or tied, a
breed of isolates it was
a still-uninhabited landscape primeval
fresh out of isostatic depression
puked up like solid food
play in this sylvan, Pleistocene crib,
growling your semi-wild words,
a culture floating in petri dish waters,
a husband
& wife the living medium,
weather to trust & bask in,
a thin-soiled voice whispers lunglessly
‘come, break through
this crusted cervix overlain with moraine’
& build from these micro-paradises,
these lime-soiled outwashes
(first a bit of sloppy exploration,
growing up quickly into the gametes,
but could anything be remembered about an incubation period
in a Star-womb Playpen?)
some do some don’t
choose to experience
little bundles of joy,
ecstatic packets of photons,
before it’s wrapped up as a vasectomy
or the years slip into menopause,
by then, correction & reward pause where
‘the children look after themselves now,’
or was it a barren time,
like ice that came down from the mountains & everywhere?
when it was time to move on, ‘never again
to make love by these lakes & rivers’
‘grasslands & tree-islands changing into closed forest’
where a few microbands of people live,
what’s out there, is it any better? or
go find your family
or a shelter among an infinite number of leaves
or discarded tires,
a shanty, a shanti
scared of reproducing yourself?
but one child wants to put its arms around every other child alive
& that ever lived
& if there was a possible defect
(showing up like from another planet?)
a Big If would find itself in bed
to beat the odds of every statistical roll-in-the-hay:
as carefully, parentally, it’s rocked
into a most special niche,
a huge welcome into
a new dream-home furnished with heavens & hells,
set free from its womb,
as if the arms & legs of I & we
had been fetally contracted there,
now stretching out, expanding
as from a singularity
Dave Shortt is a long-time writer from the USA whose earliest work can be found in the print journals Salamander (Brookline MA), Nexus (Dayton OH), Mesechabe (New Orleans), Bullhead (Ashland KY), Sulfur (Ypsilanti MI), Nedge (Providence), all but the first two now defunct; and on the internet archived at Astropoetica, Muse Apprentice Guild, and Ygdrasil.