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Shape is important in poetry. With Pterosaur, shape is everything. Not all online venues can format this level of structure so beautifully—Strange Horizons did an outstanding job (thank you AJ and Romie)!

Read the poem out this week at Strange Horizons.

This poem began with me thinking about dinosaurs that flew, of which my favorite is Quetzalcoatlus. For inspiration, I browsed photos of reconstructed skeletons, considered the sciences of archaeology and paleontology that offer windows into that time.

I wanted to write a shared narrative between the pterosaur and the quetzal bird that has eluded birdwatcher-me, despite numerous trips to Central America and the Caribbean. (They were work trips, not bird trips, which perhaps is explanatory.)

I found the linkage by imagining how the dinosaur and the modern-day bird might be joined through time. The quetzal bird is near threatened, with a diminishing population in this, what we are now calling the ongoing holocene extinction. The extinction of the dinosaurs was initiated by a cataclysmic event: Chicxulub (asteroid impactor and modern-day crater–google it, the results are animated, or read more about cool NSF-funded research).

What links the extinct dinosaur to the declining quetzal bird is shared devastation, but they also are joined through homage, through proximity to the gods. The quetzal and other birds are central to myths and stories from Mesoamerica, so I revisited my collection from an earlier space of my life (when I was debating a medical/scientific career versus one ::sigh:: devoted to comparative literature). I found special inspiration in Memory of Fire: Genesis by Eduardo Galeano and Technicians of the Sacred, a wonderful anthology of poetries from around the world.

I end with hope, the nest of the quetzal—not her legacy, but her future. I hope we can help usher in such a bright future through shared devotion to a sustainable ecology for those brilliant birds and other life we hold dear:

pipping the world-shell to emerge / from the crater. flames / have made

Image: feather and fern, photograph taken in Barbados (on a work trip)