Raven
I had a series of violent coughing fits. A sharp invasion of sounds like those which you hear from
nitrogen and phosphorus curdling in open ponds.
I was taken to see a doctor.
This doctor held my face in her hands, then reached her forearm down my throat, there retrieved
a raven, black feathered and black billed, the source of my coughing, and that which had pecked
my airways to decay.
Here’s the sad things about ravens: they know a great deal of the past, stories we’re better off
without, the muscle and cartilage that do not fossilize, the snare that had failed to loop around an
angle of attack.
The coughing had stopped, and I was thinking this would be the last time I would see my raven.
I bent my head closer to him so that he would recognize my short breaths. He held one of my
lungs in his bill.
“You know this don’t you?,” I asked him. “That the weight of damaged objects can be judged by
how they behave in the wind.”
Coyote
When I was claimed by a pack of coyotes, they called me sister, and we traveled across the
hydroelectric dam picking salmon with our teeth.
We followed the scent of mule deer to the overpass, then reached the grassland between the
decayed airport runways teeming with mice and rabbits.
“All this is yours,” the pack said with a repertoire of growls.
I ate the ears of a rabbit and said, “Yes. Yes, it is.”
I covered my hands with blown sand and clover, I strung the organisms sitting on the airport
bedrock below into long strands. Their cells rumbled when I placed them on a coyote’s coat.
As high atmospheric pressure spread over the grassland, it clung to the air and squeezed
and the air screamed.
I was sure that the anatomy of this world had adapted to ambush and drag prey over a
board, longing to make us a dead place like stone.
Sinkhole
I found a three-bellied sinkhole in a glass jar preserved with ethanol.
It had hosted a form of tuberculosis acquired from monk seals, and its armor had darkened
through the years.
Though the scars along the throat were evidence that it had been rendered mute, I swore I could
hear its elaborate calls.
Nothing like the recorded calls of European Atlantic sinkholes with a chorus like a hurricane
bending its back into green things.
It was more like a hundred cats wailing below wind turbine blades, a long song scattered inside
electricity.
Amy Roa is the author of the poetry collection Radioactive Wolves (Steel Toe Books, 2023).
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