Feel its fine skin. Put your hand on it.
I have a good hold, it won’t move. Feel
the soft fine membrane, the tracheal tubes.
Feel its pulse—subtle,
yet powerful—steady, unlike ours. No proper heart,
but many valves, so elegant.
Here—
I have it, it won’t move.
The mouths—come along, girl, show me—
see.
The inner mouth
is all muscle and spring-bow—like cartilage—
fired by the head.
Harder than a horse kicks, it can brace against the blow.
Good girl.
The teeth,
the teeth—
we cannot find how it grows its teeth. They are mineral.
Feel them.
Soft curving arc of metal,
so beautiful, a mathematical curve.
Mathematical creature.
You see the beauty?
I suppose
you must first learn to cradle,
like the face of a child,
the fresh-drawn heart of a cow, watch it beat air,
the fibers tugging beneath the tenuous pericardium,
and kneel, with moist, uplifted hands,
under the slow light,
the blind light, where there is no light or darkness
for the thousand memories
in the curved ice mind.
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Submission Name: Other Species
