The Dodo

By LESLIE MCGRATH

 

When she sheds
her last moony
red potential
a woman sheds
also obligation
(insert obligation
elsewhere)
fading from
lure to lore.

Thus woman
disappears twice.

The dodo’s gone.
Too lame to fly
too plentiful
to protect too
delicious to deny.

When the dodo
could no longer
be found on
Mauritius

Evidence
of extinction
say naturalists.

Evidence only
of disappearance
says woman.

 

Leslie McGrath is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives; Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage; and Out from the Pleiades. She has been called “an oral historian of the alienated” by poet-critic Grace Cavalieri. Winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and the Gretchen Warren Award from the New England Poetry Club, her poems and interviews have been published by AGNI, the Academy of American Poets, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Yale Review.

[Purchase Issue 19 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

The Dodo

Related Posts

Contrail across blue sky

July 2025 Poetry Feature: New Poems by our Contributors

GEOFFREY BROCK
Sing, O furrow-browed youth, / of the contrails scoring the sky, / bright as lines of cocaine / until, as they age, the eye // loses them to the blue… / Sing of the thin-skinned plane / that made those ephemeral clouds, / and of all that each contains: // the countless faceless strangers

Fenway Park

Before They Traded Devers

AIDAN COOPER
I don’t know I’m not paying attention I’m crunching / peanut shells thinking Murakami began to write novels / because of baseball why don’t I / my dad’s grumpy / I’m vegetarian now & didn’t want a frank & yes it’s probably / a phase he’s probably right but it’s a good phase

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.