My bent knee makes a mastodon
and in a naturalist's salon, they will examine the bones with pointers.
Consider the knee-skull, consider the shin-trunk.
conceive its occipital and image the whole.
Push upward against its weight and know
that creation is for you to uncover.
But listen: the lecture also bears an older trill.
Looping since whenever it was
there was motion trajecting upward, gaseous, an invisible spooling of
sloshing buckets. Assistants scurried around
a flywheel hot with friction.
Hear it like this.
There are histories untellable. Some can be excavated.
Some seep downward and away,
beneath the marl and the watershed.
Break your shovel on them if you want—
They will not burn.
Pete Coco lives in Norton, Massachusetts and holds an MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. His fiction and essays have appeared in venues like Unstuck, Barrelhouse and Other Voices, but Especes Perdue is his first published poem.
Bill Neumire
Water Cycle #1: To Whom
Shall I Return
Water Cycle #3: I Thought
There Would Be More
Laura Madeline Wiseman
Or To Release Death
Magus Magnus
Payload Dump
(3 excerpts
from drone: poetic monologue
for monotone)
Aimee A. Norton
Apache Code Errors
No Sin Like Arson
Katherine Swett
Translations of an
Algorithmic Love Poem
Amy Schreibman Walter
Online Dating Inbox
Paul Strohm
Our Interregnum
KJ Hannah Greenberg
The Sanctity of Lists
Assistance with Quickly
Becoming Unbearable
Susan L. Lin
When You Are Sleeping
Ana Maria Caballero
Another Airport Poem
Ann Skiöld
Emily Dickinson Did Not
Drive A Car
Jeremy Dixon
In Retail (xxii)
Pete Coco
Especes Perdue
Jessica Joy Reveles
Surviving the Desert