My people are muskoxen, meerkats, wild
dogs and snow leopards and geese of all kinds,
biting insects, unnamed specimens unknown
to science, the capitalist kittens
who shill, adders, asses, manatees, and goats
leaping into spring on everlooping
videos, the dugong, the narwhal, ostrich,
vireo, emu, moa departed
but not forgotten, killers wingèd, landbound,
amphibious, and the bovine,
ursine, ovine entities that wield their bulk
upon us, oblige us to stare
at their odd heft. The beasts, the beasts!
Vegetarians and bloody butchers!

In the beginning the world was not formless
but form alone, shape not congealed
into static dominions. Earth ran
quickly as steep rivers sublimated
into volcanic mist. The fuse burned fast
and the phoenix globe was born over
and hotly again. Creatures in multitudes
are proof of fire. I sing the fish that walk
on land. I yelp the mass not yet ready
to be fired into final physique—fixed
till it shatters and shards of azure clay
dissolve and flare at once. I have read it in
salt flats and watched it on hotel TV late
in snowy foothills of the Rocky
Mountains, seen it from the window
seat of the 767—born in Redmond,
Sea-Tac-bound—circling to genesis.
Pronghorns gallivant. Yellowstone wolves swim
frozen lakes. When the sun evaporates,
it is forty below. My cousins persist,
swaddled in peerless nip, beacons
aflame, disclosing the sane path through what some
call wilderness. Pelts are scarred
or striped or spotted with ash. The pages
of National Geographic scald
prurient fingers. In the small hours, groomers
drive snowcats, Prinoth Beasts, over ski hills,
leaving meringues and wakes of corduroy.

Originally published in White Wall Review 41 (2017)