We Find Ourselves Looking at Extinct Creatures

We Find Ourselves Looking at Extinct Creatures

by Val Dering Rojas

It’s not the artifacts that force us inside, but the weather: the yellow haze of humidity, sweat like  polymer turning our skins nylon slick. We find ourselves walking toward unexpected sunset, in ruddy bluffs, bands of ancient rhinoceros, our footfall the click-thump of a heart failing. We find ourselves under artificial light, which needs none of our own to fold itself into a perfect diamond over the plaques defining mouflon sheep, the blind followers, facts that show their horns curl almost one full revolution, a fact of the way Earth and Sun define a year. We find ourselves between the Pliocene and the Pleistocene, warm and cool, icecaps and extinctions, continental drift. We are within the ribcage of a wooly mammoth, a dead rainbow above us, fabricated blue sky behind. We are the mastodon that never forgets; in the reflection we see our own faces staring blankly back: rare beasts behind glass.