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

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

 

Perhaps you fed me the petrified eyelash of a dinosaur.

Birds have eyelashes, those feathered dinosaurs,

think of the ostrich, batting its thick translucent lids

and smiling coyly.  An eyelash, you said, pointing,

 

to my omelette.  But it was only the edge

of a bubble of oil.  Grease, you called it,

but when I looked horrified, you said, yummy grease,

as if adding the word yummy would make it okay. 

 

The eyelash reappeared in a stew, then in a sandwich,

then 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.

 

 

Mary Stebbins, 060329a, 060328b

 

Mary Stebbins, 060329a, 060328b