Engendering

An artist's conception by Gabriel Ugueto of Ahvaytum bahndooiveche, an ancestral sauropodomorph about the size of a broiler chicken, in its habitat 230 million years ago

Boys

It’s only the pusillanimity of men that permits boys to exist.—Anon.

Most women can remember being girls,

twerking perhaps in chill suburban fields,

calculating long odds, and the likely yields.

From such memories we smart boys desist,

bedicked by cool ballistic plastic shields,

the clever cover of the recent optimist,

a philosophic hoplite, like the ancient Greeks.

No one ever listens when the future speaks.

Garrett's Surprise

The Eastern Shoshone name, meaning “long-ago dinosaur,” was devised to counter the colonialism associated with names from European languages.—Scientifico

Ahvaytum bahndooiveche,

an animal from Laurasia

about the size of a chicken,

whose fragmentary hindlimb bones

were found in the Popo Agie Formation—Garrett's Surprise locale, today's Wyoming,

as ancestral as any from Gondwana,

never dreamt that aeons after

the great asteroid extinction,

its distant offspring would

some day be crows, blue jays,

larks, hummingbirds, and wrens,

not to mention the billions upon billions

of broad-breasted Cornish Cross hens

docilely clucking their little lives away,

commercial broilers in a matter of weeks,

after a brief poultry death camp stay.

No one ever listens when the future speaks.

Gabriel Ugueto illustration source: https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/open-spaces/2025-02-21/ahvaytum-bahndooiveche-north-americas-oldest-dinosaur-has-a-shoshone-name

Sunday, July 6, 2025