THE INVENTION OF THE EXTINCTION OF THE AUK
The imagination kindles and memory
scrolls through its rolodex of gifs, finds
Auk: pencil drawing of a bird
resembling a cross between a penguin,
Toucan Sam, and your high school boss.
A hawk fucked up by a child’s fat crayon.
Ceci n’est pas l’auk,
n’est-ce pas?
If you saw the auk today, you’d stroke.
That corridor’s blocked with brick and sheaf on sheaf
of histories that read: The Auk Is Dead.
Well-clogged, all neural pathways to the auk.
The death of the auk, like the loss of the Hood,
is something that doesn’t happen anymore;
if anything, it happens less and less:
the death of the auk is dying out.
The dying auk—as quick as the name is spoke
she’s gone again. Flightless, she has flown
backwards through time, taking
the part of your brain that has known
the awkward thing. You’ve seen the hearts
the last two hearts, saved for study,
their antique tags, their ventricle roots.
Strange vegetable.
CRYPTID TRIPTYCH #3
Fiji Mermaid
We’ve come enamoured with disgust,
daring each other to touch
its skin. Even from the mezzanine,
you’d call it fake. Don’t mean much:
the crossing of dissimilars
dives us into something rich
and strange. Strangeness we are shown
waxed into every sewn stitch.
Jackalope
Some things aren’t easy to explain
even after they’ve been caught
and killed. For example, the pain
some creatures live with.
Plain “pot
meet kettle meet vampire bat”
bullshit. Suffering doesn’t make
special things more special. Still,
look at it for skill-work’s sake:
perfect parody of nature’s
no-idea-but-in-things.
We are what we’re afflicted with:
heft of horn, width of wing.
Babe of Ravenna
Proto-Mothman, your baffling
birth preceded the grim Sack
of Ravenna, and for some
that meant that it foretold. Sum sac
tribulatio! groaned your mother,
marking how a vulture’s claw
scraped blood from her tender breast,
down scales toward a messy maw
as one eye watched from your single
shin. Your body was sin and sin again.
Priests painted you red, then stomped you flat.
Medicine was like that then.
Patrick O’Reilly is a poet from Renews, NL, and a research monitor for the Hearn Institute for Fractal Nissography. Patrick is responsible for two chapbooks: A Collapsible Newfoundland (Frog Hollow Press, 2020) and Demographics Report, November 2023 (Cactus Press, 2024).
