11/21/2020 POETRY: PAOLA FERRANTEDESCENDANTS The dinosaurs that didn’t die went slamming into windows, dazzled by the colour of a gold. Instead of flight, they had their houses built on tree tops, over many single blades of grass; they learned to run on fossils of their dead. They lived and learned the many things they thought they had to learn; how to upright, how to sit down, how eventually to crawl. The sun still happened. The water happened. The ice that once had happened didn’t happen anymore. Instead of crawling, the dinosaurs that didn’t lay down without a lullaby and watched a world they made through glass. They saw but thought they didn’t, the edges of the birds whose songs were stuck inside a bottle, the make-believe of golden eggs. UPON DISCOVERING SILICONE IMPLANTS DO NOT BURN AT 1500 ºF All the women I have been have been a beautiful shedding of rat snake confused where her tail ends another bites where the woman ends the Barbie plastic takes a thousand years to decompose; the leather jacket made for a boy I wore when everyone forgot it was skin, now down to hide the reason people don't like rats; they eat their shit. It won't look good on Food TV. Most days I try to breathe human, speak human to men producing plastics, men producing sedatives making fishes fearless, men who say they want to get to know the inside of an oyster will sever adductors to force her from her shell will cut the legs off lady bugs when they were boys they didn't know why the short-tailed cricket eats her wings. I speak human while they touch the me that is fake pearls made from cotton and crumbs that glitter while vacuuming someone else's floor, the me who is dollar store trophy expendable, botox blocked from genuine signal paralysed reliving the men how a cockroach scuttles for seemingly random escape reliving the men as apid stinger lodged in the jaw grinding my teeth while I sleep, the moment my mind became an ant marching in circles. All the women I have had to be have been quiet inside a boardroom watching Predator on casual Fridays, quiet inside a game of Twister, wrong hand on red beautiful in lips sewed up, frog legs stuffed in the back of a cab watching drunk for cobras between my knees. The amygdala says orange is the colour of fear. I am spending my life in someone else's fake tan as though all the women I have had to become have forgotten U.V. In a thousand years all that's left of me will be all those liners on maxi-pads with wings; in a thousand years I want none of this to have to matter to all the women I will not be who after me are issued wings like the short-tailed cricket; I want the matter of synthetic fibres to disintegrate, return to earth. "Upon Discovering Silicone Implants Do Not Burn At 1500 ºF" previously published in RiddleFence, Issue 32, Spring 2019. Paola Ferrante's debut poetry collection, What to Wear When Surviving A Lion Attack, was published Spring 2019 by Mansfield Press.. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in, PRISM International, Joyland, Grain, and elsewhere. She won The New Quarterly's 2019 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award and Room's 2018 prize for Fiction. She is the Poetry Editor at Minola Review and resides in Toronto, Canada. She can be found on twitter @PaolaOFerrante
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