ISSUE ONE: March, 2019

NEW STUDIES WILL IMPROVE THE UNDERSTANDING OF MAMMAL RELATIONSHIPS

by NICK FULLER GOOGINS

July 11:30PM, illuminated by moonglow

a glacier calves

when small icebergs detach from its leading edge. They are not rare

but are rarely seen

and even as newborns look like miniature adults.

The illusion of unbroken scenery.

Any evolutionary tree is a hypothesis.

How do we know?

Look closely.

The animals around you
are just a sample.

Author Note:
This poem came about from a half-dozen trips to the Hall of North American Mammals, found within the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The Hall features 43 dioramas of taxidermied animals from around the continent, displayed before artistic backdrops of painted mountains, glaciers, forests, and prairies. Accompanying the dioramas are informational placards about the animals and their environments. By taking lines from individual placards and then "stitching" the lines together in new ways, a series of poems slowly evolved that can speak to all of us mammals, human and nonhuman alike. 

NICK’s fiction and poetry has been read on NPR's All Things Considered, and has appeared in The Southern Review, Ecotone, Narrative, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the Rutgers-Newark MFA program and recipient of a fellowship at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, which is definitely not haunted. He lives some of the time in Los Angeles and some of the time in Maine. In his spare time he installs solar panels and plays trombone as the least-talented musician in an activist street band. He has recently completed his first novel.