EXTINCTION EVENT KRISTY BOWEN
extinction event
extinction event dancing girl press & studio, 2021
It's summer, and it's always a party. Bring only what you can carry in your tiny shell. In this tiny hell you call daylight. Bell sleeves and body glitter. Your best teeth to bite the hand that feeds you. We mistook it for a picnic, so we made potato salad that rotted in the sun. One gala apple after another we shot off each other's heads. After all, the fossils weren't remains, not really, but the mass that took up the space where we were. Filled the holes we left behind. Nothing but hair and bone, when we were once so pretty. Tidily packing for an afternoon in the ammunition fields, wielding our baskets over hills. Killing the birds with rocks and filling our pockets with shells. Look at the way our bodies glint under the ozone glow. The footprints that vanish before dawn. The clearing we claimed as ours swallowing us whole until nothing was left but a spoon, a broken plate. The inevitable party after the party died out, our sequins scattered in the dirt.
Eventually we need a place to house the bones. Room after room stuffed with the dead. In the basement we stack them on shelves and tuck them into drawers. Ours, the best kind of chloroform, the sleep you descend into like a staircase. A swift twist of the neck. We almost believed you were dead, except for the slow growl of a pulse. The way your eyes flicker when we drag a comb through the matted fur. How you mewl and hiss through the slats after everyone goes home. Morning, playing possum at the bottom of your glass cage. The busted latch fastened from the inside. We almost believed you wanted out.
We thought we were digging out, but we were digging in. Rigging the gages and resetting the clock. The foxes were alarmed at our indifference. In their tiny boxes, they watched us, year after year, until our bodies grew larger than our houses could hold. We lived for years that way, spilling out of windows and into the rivers, smoke collecting in our hollows. What could we tell you of the lives of such creatures? Such treacherous limbs? The butterfly that flapped its wings not in Asia, but in our lungs, and birthed the hurricane. How it spun like sugar in the hand of a girl who crashed through the honeysuckle bushes and trampled the marigolds. What could we tell you of her life through bits of doll and fallen sheetrock? The order of her bones? The holes in her teeth?
In this box, I collect the broken things. The twisted oak, the dusty lynx. Budgies and buntings and speckled hawks tumbled from their nests. We are going on a picnic and can take only the most unfortunate. The deer missing its antler, the one-eyed frog. Like Noah, we build and build, but the space gets smaller. Nothing can breathe, least of all me. My lungs stopped up with feathers and the small animals I've smuggled inside the body for safe keeping. In the box, we rustle the feathers and bend the bones, but nothing fits. Even side by side, stacked vertically in rows. Nothing sits upright or thrives. We name them, tag their tiny feet, and still, nothing moves inside the box. All night we soothe them with sounds their mothers make, but still they sleep and dream of trees.
If I name it, I can have it. Can lather it in the tub and tuck it into bed. Dead or alive, it makes a pretty picture. All night, I waited for the names to come to me and all night they resisted. Twisted in the branches and got stuck on the fence. I went to rescue them, and they tangled in my hair. What gorgeous corpses. What pretty disasters. All night, they sang in the rafters, and all night, I yearned. Couldn't sleep until every wing was pinned to a board and every mouth stuffed with paper. The gap between the word and the thing strung together like dolls.
Most men cannot decide whether or not to love the landscape, or to eat it. They arrive with their guns and attempt to love whatever survives. To revive what they've killed. But the artist knows the constellations, the June morning. The exact alignment of venus over the buffalo, the way the moon slips behind the hill. In the distance, there are villages full of hungry mouths. Rivers full of blood. You cannot love the landscape that devours you. Though you try, each tiny stone, each fallen branch. The shadow of a dung beetle creeping across the dirt. As soon as you capture it, it changes. The men who make love to the earth do so at their own peril. Feral dogs and sand fleas gnawing their way through notebook after notebook, hooking claw and tooth to land.
Eventually everything takes flight. Everything fakes its way through windfall and gravity and emerges from the rubble, broken limbed and breathing. In the beginning, you were an exquisite little monster. The tiny skeletons and shells in your caw. Shrieking all night like you were on fire. And maybe you were. The feathers that kept you warm, singing when it all went up. Flapping your arms against the ground. A little height, and you were insufferable. Insatiable. Craving bloodshed and bone break. But oh, the way you sang as the sky fell. Banging your wings against the horizon, and burning it all down.
It would be eons before the first man stumbled, dazzled from the cave into the light, but a single cell hatched in the muck. Struck a flint in the dna and there you go. Inevitably, things take the shape of what surrounds them. In the river, the fish-shaped things flicker in the current. Bird- shaped things take flight. Girl-shaped things fan themselves out against the sand. Name things. Contain things. Write them down. We put the bear-shaped things together in a pile. The dog- shaped things. The cat-shaped things crawl through the underbrush hunting the mouse-shaped things. Alone, the bones of a trout and snake are indistinguishable, but dead nonetheless. An archaeologist can determine the gender of a skeleton just by the heft of its weight in his hand. The girl shapes were always piling up along the shore. Lodging themselves in drainage ditches. Growing fins and scales to swim the darkest waters.
You are cordially invited to our soiree, our sorry fury. Leave your coat at the door. You Won't need boats or tools. Only the most-cold blooded of us survive, so you'll do fine. Sipping champagne and talking about horses. At 5, we walk around the swimming pool. It's deadly, but we love to look at it. Love to hook our toes around the edge of the diving board and threaten to jump. Our bellies plump with salmon puffs and nitrous. Our skin fibrous and slick. Sick with all that longing. The frogs that skirt the pool six- limbed and blind. How we catch them and toss them in our giant pot, crack open the tiny legs, and eat.
Everything you thought you knew about evolution was wrong. A song with different words than the one you think. The dinosaurs did not know they were dying all at once. But slowly, each bone in their bodies reaching for transformation. Fins becoming limbs becoming wings before the trees became hot and uninhabitable. Before the ash plume spanned the sky. Every creature changed until they reached perfection. Sea star, jelly fish, spiny shark. Removed the old self from the body and glistened new. Even the insects that survived moved slow across the forest floor. When you thought they were humming, they were screaming.
By the time the end rolls around, we loll into the basements and beer gardens of our neighborhoods. It's a party, and we're dying. It's a sad chicken salad. It's streamers soaking in rain. Before your eyes went white, we used to talk about the birds. The cardinal that insisted on throwing himself again and again at the window. What did we know? I was made of fruit salad and deviled eggs, my tupperware dirty and scratched at the bottom where I kept the flies I'd dole out one by one at each meal. What beautiful starving we did, there in the moonlight that was older than us. There in the mud, where we made our burrows and prayed for death, quick as a mousetrap closing around our necks.
Here, I put this box inside the other box. This monster inside the other monster's mouth. Both of us so thirsty we mistook the horizon for a lake. The sunlight for a sliver of stream, winding its way through a garden them in hair, but they are blood colored and sick. Thick with ants. This monster in my belly eating its way from the inside of the egg, little claw in my mouth. The box inside the box shakes a little then goes soft. I name the monster and stick a label to its broken, bloodied foot. To all the feet of all the monsters, their wings curled tight against their bodies.
Sometimes the box goes dark. The larks and swallows quiet and it's still light enough to watch the enormous furred animal lumber over rocks. It's no good unless you can smell his heat, the meat of his hindquarters. Every bristled hair in place and the wet leaves close enough. You long to lick the droplets from them. You did not know how thirsty you were until the animals exploded in a flutter of moths. In your throat, your eyes--a million transparent wings catching in your lungs. You placed the tiniest pebbles between your teeth and waited for rain that never arrived, the moment frozen before you, thick tongued and dry.
When it came for us, we did not know what to name it. The game in the way we'd hold our breath under the lake, aching. We were so busy swimming down and down, we forgot to surface, and somehow, then the lake was gone. Nothing left but a tiny rowboat at the bottom, stuck in the mud. The animals inside it, the smallest of things. Crawdad. Mudpuppy. But oh, how we sang to them, made them our pets. Curled them close in the bed and named them after the dead. What dread we felt when they too, withered beneath our fingers. When they too, rejected the names we gave them and swam away.
I keep this box to hold all the things. To hide the bad parts and spit shine the best. Out west, California was always burning. The men rescued the paintings from the art museum, just as the smoke began to fill the halls. Nature is beautiful, but oh, can she be terrible. A troublesome knot of ash and bone. One home persisted while the others around it burned. How can you explain fate to the dinosaurs. So big in their contradictions. So tiny in their brains. They surely didn't know what was coming any more than the trees wait for rain that never arrives. Or us, with our paint brushes and canvas lined up along the ridge. Waiting for the first glimmer of flame to catch and burn everything down.
In the end days, we keep all our birds locked tight in the cabinet. If we pose them just right, bend the rusted wire to and fro, we can almost pretend they're singing. Wings banging against a yellowed sky while the lakes boil and roll with oil. You wanted to love them, wanted to tuck their tiny feathers against their breasts and sing them alive again. The one you found covered in petroleum, so dark it was blind, was your favorite. How you fretted over him, scrubbed his tiny beak with dish soap, but still he gasped and failed. The eyes went still as the sink drained. Every time you took him near the lamp, he caught on fire. Your glistening little mudlark, your tiny little prayer.
Here we put like things with like things. Socks and shoes and busted vacuum cleaners. The retainer you wore all through junior high then lost at the carnival. Your mother's dressing gown covered in feathers. All protected and preserved behind glass. In third grade, the boy who pulled your hair, his head was oddly misshapen. You'd stare at the back of it for hours. His skull now on floor three, next to the doll who would spit up on aven't put our fingers on. Pried open it's jaw and plucked out the truth. They lie glistening in cases for miles.
The large animals are the trickiest. You can stuff a warbler in a tree and be done with it. Shape his mouth to sing. But the lion demands authenticity. Spread out lithe on the fake rocks, teeth groan soft as house cats and the men like chicken wings on a plate. The hyenas scavenging for prey. The approaching grizzly. How to pose a killer to look like a killer? The men in pelts, with their primitive tools and their penchant for bloodlust. Who strikes the most fear? Sheds the most blood? Holds the most menacing spear? How to paint the landscape so that it holds enough menace. Blood in the trees, in the river, running veins of red through the rocks.
We invite you to place your hands on the back of the seat in front of you. Your head between your knees. This is going to be rough ride. A bumpy conclusion. The fish we caught were inedible, so we're serving blackbird, skyfallen by the hundreds over Kentucky. We're having only the best wine, but it's a little acidic. Swallow at your own risk. Spit promptly into the bowl at your right. The lilies are beautiful, but they're only good for about an hour. By six, they'll have shriveled to nothing. We have the best fatted calf, the best fruit, all completely inedible, but lovely to look at.
Hold a estimate the gate of her walk. The park she broke her arm in. The taffy between her teeth. Every hollow in the cranium is another house she could not live in. Another echo chamber rotting from the inside out. We thought we knew her bones, but they lied. Knew her limbs and zip code. The precise moment she died. All of us. The world that crumbled in, and the space she left around her glowing with radium and fireflies.
If you round the canvas slightly, you can create distance. The illusion that the landscape goes on for miles. That the bird that flies just beyond the trees does so forever and into infinity. The perception angle, bent slightly, and the mouse escapes into the underbrush, pursued by the snake. We can believe he goes in and just keeps going. That the world is no longer finite. No longer frightening. That we emerge on the other side of the forest battered and starving, but still alive.
extinction event was composed for a reading that took place at the Field Museum of Natural History in October 2019 as part of their Poets in the Field series in conjunction with the Poetry Foundation. Fragments of this project have previously appeared in Stirring, River Mouth Review, and
The Account.
DANCING GIRL PRESS & STUDIO