When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away—
relocated they call it—
their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming.
Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart,
twisted knot, hot blood rivering
to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet.
Just weeks before
I watched a bear and her cubs run down a mountain
in the twilight.
So buoyant, they seemed to be tumbling
to the meadow,
to the yarrow root they dug, rocking
to wrest it from the hard ground, fattening for winter.
They were breathing what looked like gladness.
But that other mother . . .
Her massive head raised, desperate to catch their scent.
Each footfall a fracture in the earth’s crust.
Tag: animals
“Self-Portrait in the Body of a Whale,” Frances Justine Post
We come upon the body of a whale, a fresh beaching.
It smells like a thousand fishes.
I crawl in on the carpet of its tongue, seeking the injury out.
Outside, you cough and look away as I squint
through the eye at you. I dig into the room
its ribs make and squat in the warm gloom. The heart,
a chandelier, hangs down, ringed with veins. Here and there
the skin, thinned by hermit crabs, lets in the light
like a stained glass window with blood red panes.
I lie down on the bed of its liver as the tide fills the body,
each wave, higher. You give the whale a kick
I almost didn’t feel and gesture towards the dunes,
backing away, disappearing. Is this who you really are?
This is where I live now like a barnacle,
stern and grumpy. If you try to move me, I will cut you.
Punch-in-the-Face Poetry 