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.]