Dodo
You’ve been thought rail, penguin, albatross, goose, vulture &or shrunken ostrich until finally designated ground pigeon. Accounts recording how easy your capture—fearless the sailors commented of your approaching. How grabbed by your foot & dangled you honked out & the others came scrambling. When you waddled your knot-arse right up to the pistol they in turn blamed you for your obsolescence. You’d think 13.8 billion years later we’d’ve gleaned a nugget of enlightenment, knowing the common denominator between a beluga & a shrew is a hair, that literally we’re One Human Family, the helix traced back to a single cell. Hadn’t Marie repeated there is no us & them there is only us? It would revert. If humanity perished before destroying it all nature would take over. Reclaim the labefaction. It’s any apocalypse’s nucleoplasm. And while it’s getting harder to bear our collective grief among the accumulating horrors—we’ve still lavender & melody, we’ve still cosmic glitter & laughter but daily is (the) slaughter, people huddle or are, camps creep up in the thick hours & what happens within baffles (or should) the heart—I think it’s fair to say some of us still’ve the god shattering rage to bash the gold gilded egg & lift each other up from the sharp mulch because if we don’t—we’ll all eschaton into the revelatory flames we’ll all can of worms into the ether
Wolf
pack wending rivers. It’s like that movie—a broken soul finds himself on a bridge staring into the floe cursing the day he was born but it turns out the role he plays in the plot of things extends beyond his cells & is therefore returned. Or greeting someone who remembers you but who’s a ghostspot in your memory: reintroduction. Howl stirred,/ the ice-age-carved tributaries recalibrated their paths/ banks stabilized/ pools formed/ channels narrowed/ fox mice hare multiplied/ coyotes dwindled/ regrowth scarred-over splitting bark/ those crown sharpeners the elk & red deer forsook valleys & gorges receding into hills’ thin/ aspen elongated skyward/ cottonwood spurted green fingerlings/ songbirds & hawk eagle raven those birds of prey rematerialized/ bears like moving caves of obsidian gorged until dreamdrunk on bushes that berried/ the fraught with chaos began to obey/ threat anew proved integral as a drop of rain to the mountains solid in their heaving/ foliage, cones, rush of prints, nuzzle, throats belling moon/ Montana’s unbanning of neck snares, baiting, spotlight night-hunting, lengthening of trapping season/ bloodshed spilling/ the wolves are bending rivers
Incubus
Gaping frozen in the bed I watched myself through the wall of the monastery-cum-artist-retreat walk down the hall, twin head turning to glance back at itself. My voice strangled so that I screamed a scream mouthless & unheard as the room transformed into something out of a King movie or a Keatsian poem, time unmoored I could hear vines curl like cellophane, crackling indigo it was as if a hoof were pressing me into the mattress the bed became a slab of marble as of a tomb I could not move except to close my eyes but that didn’t erase the scene. Hours those moments lasting. When I came to light & birdsong seeped in through the window. I blushed when Tracey said sleep paralysis slipping me something to blunt the shapeshifting. Synesthesia & night hag. Hypnopompic hallucination as explanation. But she wasn’t there days later, when, still unable to eat, I out-of-bodied & rose to the ceiling feeling what the spirit must approximate. My material-self bed-bound beside my wife, my wife dreaming unawares—so slowly I lifted closer to the roof of that shelter, I’d to crane toward daybreak lest my nose brush eggshell. Lest I kiss the moon of that plafond. Lest I ghost into ghost
Reprinted with permission from Zoodikers: A Bestiary by Flower Conroy, published in © 2026 by the University of Tampa Press. All rights reserved.
