Jack Horner and Julia Child outside the Montana Museum of Natural History

Remember when you fed me the petrified eyelash

of a dinosaur?  Or so I thought.  An eyelash, I said, pointing,

to my omelette.  Birds have eyelashes, those feathered dinosaurs—

consider the ostrich, batting its thick translucent lids

 

and smiling coyly.  (Remember when you used to smile

at me like that?)  You insisted it was only the edge

of a bubble of oil.  Grease, I called it, and you were horrified. 

 

So you said, yummy grease, as if adding the word yummy

would make it okay.  Would make anything okay, now.

 

That eyelash reappeared in a stew, in a sandwich,

on my steak.  It grew and grew.  Not a coprolite, precisely,

not the imprint of a giant fern or the wing of a pterosaur, just that eyelash.

The tyrannosaur who lost it thrashes in my belly.

 

            And in the bed between us,

Shoving outward.

 

Mary Stebbins Taitt

Note on the poem:  Originally from a MNP assignment given by Patrick Lawler

070814, 070531, 060329a, 060328b Sent to Turtleink Tuesday, August 14, 2007