Liza Rose

Winner — Editor’s Spotlight Award in Poetry

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NAMING THE LIVING

Adam named the animals, i was
taught as a girl, but as a woman, i think
it had to be Eve, or Lilith—only a woman
could birth words like fawn or frog or lamb
so accurately. a name is a breath

held in the chest and expelled through air
as invisible birds. i hold and release
the names of living things
as they disappear from the earth—Atlas
Bear, Thylacine, Xerces Blue, Golden

Toad, Caspian Tiger, Passenger Pigeon, Dodo.
when my mother named me, i was
almost Scarlet—a shade like the extinct Splendid Poison
Frog, Lilth’s wild hair, Eve’s apple. almost Brooke,
mineral rich, soft running water which is life. no,

my brother, earthside for just five trips around the sun, said:
her name is Elizabeth—we knew each other
in Heaven. so my mother breathed the breath she’d drawn
from my great great grandmother, Elizabeth, who i only know
wrote and collected glass swans, white-feathered dinosaurs

immortalized as crystal bowls we gathered from the dirt
on which my grandfather had tossed them, glued their sharp
shard beaks back on. i tell this to The Poet who asks
about origins upon first meetings. in return, i ask
how she was christened: she was thought, she says,

to be a boy until born, and when she emerged
a girl, blood streaked and screaming, her father flipped
through the Bible’s leaves, pointed, and there it was: rose of
Sharon. i hold her name
in my hands as i type and retype her poems for her, watch her voice

bleed into mine—how beautiful, this heritage, this bond
through the menagerie of language, how she cleared the thorned path
to write about our womanly bodies, our womanly lives. when i arrive
at her door one day, skin pink from late summer sun, she asks me to not call out
her name. it sounds like a question, she says, which makes her

wonder if she’s really there, and she wants to feel like she is
still here. you are here, i say. look: i am here.

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MARTHA, THE LAST PASSENGER

          species endling, beautiful final girl. she survived
to 29, alone, young silver starlet in a glass-wall stage
cage, seraphic spectacle, until her soul flew
the small coop of her body, which was
iced, skinned, dissected, stuffed, mounted, displayed.

                     *

          the Seneca watched these pigeons
with awe and admiration, not hunting
during nesting, just observing, not cutting
a chosen tree of a “chief” pigeon, coexisting
with the jah’gowa, or “big bread”, or “Passenger
Pigeons”, or “Martha’s ancestors”.

                     *

passenger, from the French word for
passing by.

                     *

          “Passenger Pigeons in Autumn”
the sign at the museum says, and there they are—Martha’s cousins
posed as if alive, foraging in fake foliage, acorns in beaks, sepia feathers spread.
their meat was sold for a penny, the sign also says.
i catch my primate-face reflection in the fingerprint-smudged glass.

                     *

          she looks like a lady
in the black and white photos gazing over
her ruffled shoulder—neck long, feathers tidy, soft
slope of breast, beak small. aerial Marilyn
Monroe, in some photos, she is aglow with life.
in most, she is the faded memory of it.

                     *

          at her final resting place, a plaque
on a bronze statue of her likeness
says that the hope is that those who see
this memorial will work toward the preservation
of all the world’s fauna, which includes me and you,
whether you descend from the Seneca,
or from, like me, the Europeans who arrived on their land
and made the trees and birds disappear.

                     *

we. we are the world’s fauna.

                     *

          it is said that the weight of
a flock could snap limbs from trees, and that all
those single flecks together created one
amorphous breathing creature which turned blue skies
eclipse-black, sometimes for days, a sight almost apocalyptic.

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ALL CREATURES

I.

picture the lambs alive
bleating
in the field before boys
beat and dismembered
their cotton-soft bodies—

           boys will be
boys                         men
said of the high school football team
who, after a failed coyote-hunting trip,
jumped the fence of the pasture—so clearly
the killing was not
satanic, they said,
just a wilding, just
boys looking for some
excitement

found in the form of
living beings beat
with the butts of guns
          then torn apart

—we didn’t want to
waste the meat.

          whether
they bragged
about the slaughter in high school hallways, or if
guilt settled
like wet wool in their stomachs,
i do not know—

II.

my body
was on bent knees
in the kinder
-garten of the catholic
school my best friend would later, in time,
(like Eve from the garden, or Lilith) be expelled from,
when she was ten and didn’t quite know yet
that she was a girl.

behold the Lamb
of God who takes
away the sin of—

           the town
smelled of dryer sheets, leaves,
gasoline. abandoned
railroads, coal dust, bones.

those boys stayed
on the homecoming ballot.
i do not know
whether one was voted king,

just know that when we grow
to their age, their brothers and cousins
will boast
how they long to kill
my best friend i was blessed with
because boys can’t like boys, (then) boys
           can’t be girls. not
here. and some existence,
they believe, is sin.

as is empathy.

i picture the lambs
alive—

         forgive me—

---

WOMAN WRITER

bloated blackberries
lining
the path—
nature’s fecundity, my own
breath
heavy
as ripe fruit.

meanwhile, fawns
unfurl
in clearings,
minutes, seconds old.

i have lived
quarter of a century.
my mind is full
-y developed
(apparently).

and Keats wrote
everything
he would ever write
by now. and also
trained in surgery.

time passes by
the rows
of my birth
control pills.

i want to be
a writer; i want
to be a mother

someday.
how long
before i am
discarded
like some dead thing?

meanwhile—
the sun
falling
heavy
over
the path.

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TO THE TWO CREATURES WHO DIED TOGETHER

did you ever think about how you’d die? did you expect it
to be             hiding
to escape the earth’s surface, where the heavens

rained fire, and drought and flood reigned—
                                          hiding
beneath a world that, millions of years later, would be

called Hell on earth by creatures who observe you
through radiation scans, creatures who created
both bomb and bomb shelter, creatures who are

both killing the earth and denying it,
creatures who try to make sense of things by imposing
narratives on you—Misery makes for strange bedfellows:

hostile Earth pushes early Triassic mammal and amphibian to share den.
they say you never would’ve cohabitated this way, with
no tooth-marked bone, no sign of predator and

prey, it’s easy to write your story for you, imagine
that you were friends, or Triassic Romeo and Juliet—
A Triassic Cuddle Set in Stone—all the narratives

we create because we can’t feel the fear you felt
in the moment that lead you there: Thrinaxodon
digging down into black earth,

                                                   hiding
from the storm, broken-ribbed Broomistega stumbling
upon shelter, descending into the burrow, fear creating

fellowship, or at least acceptance, company
that would last 250 million years after
two fates were sealed beneath a flash flood.

250 million years later, my earth ancestors, i am
                                                   petrified.
 

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Banner Art:
V. Fernandez, 3D imaging of a fossilised Thrinaxodon and Broomistega, 2013, European Synchrotron Radiation Facility