My cat carries a tiny finch to the back door. Its limp body sparks my fear. In the 4:00 a.m. dark, the heavy quiet, I murmur through the glass, “Put it down.” I whisper, “Let me see.” Excited by my captive attention, she places the tawny clump of feathers softly before me. I crack open the door, light and warmth spilling forward. Suddenly, small wings flutter fast, and the bird gusts over the deck railing, whisked into endless pre-dawn. The cat jerks her head up, spins a tight, frustrated circle, scans a rumpled pile of leaves beneath her feet. “Come in,” I call, as my own early-morning judges now roused, compete to revive my life’s silenced losses, their sharp flights.

The Woolly Mammoth Returns

Its bright cells snuggled beneath frost,

the wooly mammoth waits upon science.

Now locked in gravity, it will return

to spin round a still, silent, elephantine

point not of its making. The frozen beast—

de-extinct—awaits the blood resurrection,

bringing tender footprints to bear on the

tundra between us, the subdermal pulse

imprinting itself on the round curve of 

Earth, the world’s yearning for giants.

But once caught on the horns of creation, 

can science alter the design of its end?

​