Poetry

I’ve been here since the Miocene, when mammoths,
whales, and pinnipeds were thriving, and pachyderms
dispersed abroad from Africa’s savannas. My current iteration:
 

five-fingered claws, black and orange patterned scales studded
with osteoderms, hiss and snort when I am pissed. When I awaken,
ravenous, from winter sleep, my lumbering swagger sways my hips

 

from side to side in sluggish transit over sand, a painted glyph

on desert rock. My fleshy tongue keeps smelling, smelling, seeking prey,
nictitating membranes sliding sideways over apathetic eyes.

I am a nest-marauder, devouring turtle eggs and tiny quail, swallowing

baby cottontails alive, head first, impervious to their squirming.
To eat is all I live for. I am survivor, fossil, imperturbable, indifferent

to nonexistence. Soullessness and molting have given me detachment:
the gift of mattering not mattering. Yet I matter now, because my poison’s
medicine for you, a life elixir. Monsters dwelling among you shame

the weight of others, decry their appetites, their seeming lack of will,
ascribing to afflicted bodies not defective islet cells, leptin, ghrelin, kinases,
but rather, moral choices gone awry, the sin of self-indulgence.

I’ll banish your monstrosity, your punishment of those who must not eat
at will and yet, like me, who cannot help but eat. The secrets dripping

from my bite will stagger them; the power bursting from my jaw, heal you.