Snot-yellow&flaky as any wasp’s nest, sockets snuffed out, brain gulch rinsed untilitshollow bone’s just brittle paper.
Sand-grains in its muzzle rattlewith a thistle. A dust-upmusteredinaquashed-offsketch the windsblast.You werethe last sad prince
of avastcivilization whenthe sun-torchedheart -land tremored with snorting shadows&thunder decenteredacrossanendless pasture oftickseeds
& asters,only to be pitched athwart parched meadows—mudholes hard winters disaffect. A splintery quill, a relic from an age gone by.
Glaciation Mastodons rot below us. Neanderthals thaw out as gases leak from permafrost and drunken trees burble into sinkholes, exposing bones and karst. Fabled giants will walkagain--meander inaslow burn.
Yes,lost creatures have begun to resurrect. New ones areevolving, lumbering toward us. Theearthismurmuring.MaybeI’m the missing link.Listen. Athin ice bursts. They’recoming.
Their far-off footsteps are my own heartbeat.
-- Will Cordeiro has work published in AGNI, Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, The Threepenny Review, THRUSH, and elsewhere. Will won the 2019 Able Muse Book Award for Trap Street and is co-author of Experimental Writing: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology, forthcoming from Bloomsbury. Will co-edits Eggtooth Editions and teaches at Northern Arizona University.