Photo by Andy Holmes
March 8th, 2020 Challenge
Hatchling
the dinosaur took me in his arms
on the car hood, like it was acceptable,
even though the law said there should be
a circle between us. the triceratops pointed
at the sky where a bird knocked
into another bird: we should kiss but your mouth
is the hunter’s mouth is the edge of a soft thing. he let me
rest my head on his leathery cheek.
my manager told me I’d never work in a park again,
I didn’t understand efficiency:
could I press play and incinerate bones?
did I not, as he preached, have a god inside me
that would hate illegal immigrants? they
showed us on a doll once,
nails pinned in the plushy, perishable limbs,
to prove there’s not enough space
for two beasts. hatchling, I hope you stay inside,
separation would be cruel. I try not to think
about my birth and his.
Author's Commentary
For me, the poem is about Otherness and the current society's desire to erase several "unwanted" individuals. The line about "illegal immigrants" is ironic, it is the manager speaking (he appears earlier), and he stands for all figures of authority claiming that we are pure and self-sufficient and must not commingle. Particularly now, with the new health crisis, people want to draw lines around nationhood, race, and class, and use arguments about sacred individuality and miscegenation. Whereas in the poem, the speaker at the end is pregnant with the "dinosaur's child" who represents the foreign "beast"/unwanted immigrant, and as such, her child would be unwanted too (and even taken away from her). She hopes the child stays inside, protected from this arbitrary reality, and she considers what her birth would have been like in such conditions. At the same time, the dinosaur is not foreign: he was here before us and died in our stead, and so I see the "immigrant Other" as a deep-rooted self that we are trying to deny.
The Author
Florina Nastase is an Assistant Professor at 'Alexandru Ioan Cuza' University in Yassi, Romania. She holds a Ph.D. in American poetry and spends too much time writing fan fiction online under various guises. She has been published in Gasher Journal and High Shelf Press and hopes to publish more in the future.
Florina Nastase, Romania
Kommentare