Luna Dragon Mac-Williams
Fossils
1.
I heard they draw dinosaurs
scarier than they probably
actually were. Which is to say,
it’s interesting that we make
a monster out of what’s lost
so we let go of it more easily.
Or maybe we make foreign
what we don’t understand
so we feel better about not
understanding it.
2.
In a fossil there is bone.
When something hurts, it cuts
“to the bone.” What’s left is
the structure and what has hit
us hardest. They ask what’s hit
me hardest, or where it hurts
the worst, I say I don’t know.
3.
Did they mean to give us
their selves? And who are we
to be greedy with them?
4.
Pressure creates fossils,
can we press without pushing?
Can we save without turning
up the heat, get to a heart
without melting to stone?
On child in a house,
bread in the cabinet,
a small warm animal
in hand?
5.
People remembered
get twisted.
6.
Maybe holding is changing.
To pull it out in futures that
breathe different air.
In a universe expanding,
we have never been
in the same place twice.
7.
What I Can’t Let Go Of:
. 1. This headache
. 2. The tiny garbage in my “can of small things”
. 3. My need for it all to “work out”
8.
Things worth having
are things worth lasting,
no?
About the writer:
Luna Dragon Mac-Williams is a writer, actor, dancer, jeweler, arts educator, and an undergraduate student at Wesleyan University. She is a semi-finalist for Definition Theater’s 2020 Amplify festival. Her poetry apppears in SWWIM, Inverted Syntax, Flying Ketchup, Seven Circle, Funicular, and Ariel’s Dream. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee.
Image: The Fossil Hunter by Rita Greer. Oil on panel. No size specified. 2005. By Free Art License.
