Alison C. Rollins
Elephants Born Without Tusks

 

The Washington Post says that green burials are

on the rise, as baby boomers plan for their future

 

their graves marked with sprouting mushrooms

little kneecaps crawling up from the dirt’s skin

 

like Michael Brown decomposing into the concrete

ending as natural product of the environment.

 

Elephants are now being born without tusks    

their genetics having studied the black market

 

DNA a spiral ladder carefully carved

from wooden teeth of Founding Fathers.

 

Never let a chromosome speak for you, they will

only tell a myth—an ode to the survival of the fittest.

 

Peppered moths are used to teach natural selection

their changes in color an instance of evolution.

 

Birds unable to see dark moths on soot covered trees.

The number of blacks always rising with industry.

 

Life is the process of erosion, an inevitable wearing down

of the enamel.  The gums posing the threat of disease.

 

On most websites they suggest biodegrading

choosing a coffin made from pine or wicker.

 

The man in the paper said, I want to be part of a tree,

be part of a flower—go back to being part of the Earth.

 

I imagined my Mother then, her short-cropped hair

like freshly cut grass, immune to the pains of mowing.

 

The Natural Burial Guide for Turning Yourself into a

Forest sits waiting in my Amazon shopping cart.

 

Pink salmon have now evolved to migrate earlier

I am familiar with this type of Middle Passage

 

a loved one watching you move on without a trace

the living inheriting an ocean of time

 

the sun rewiring the water-damaged insides

cells desiring to go back from where they came

 

\\ certain strands of

your kind now extinct.

 

 
Found In Volume 46, No. 03
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Alison C. Rollins
About the Author

Alison C. Rollins was born and raised in St. Louis City. Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior ReviewIndiana ReviewPoetry, and elsewhere. She is a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship and a 2018 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She has also been awarded support from the Cave Canem Foundation, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Currently she works as a librarian at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her debut collection Library of Small Catastrophes is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press Spring 2019.