The Northville Review
an online literary journal
Mything

Devon Miller-Duggan

It’s hard not to notice the resemblance
of pterodactyls and dragons,
even though you know the humans weren’t around.
Not even the proto-monkeys were around
or whatever it was that turned into proto-monkeys.
The world was awful then, the flora & fauna struggling
to figure out who to eat and who to feed.

DNA tests on hair samples collected in Nepal reveal
a primate species unrecorded so far,
and unmanipulated photos offer up
the footprints of an upright-walking mammal
of great size.

Atlantis has been found by deep ground radar,
a ringed city in mud flats, 60 miles inland
from the sea that rose to drown it,
close to where Plato said,
surrounded by “memorial” cities in a wide radius,
built, archaelogists believe, by survivors of the tsunami.

Monsters under beds: true.
Skeletons in closets: true.
Ents: True, too. Trees speak, though
slow enough it takes years to make a record of
a single back-and-forth from tree to tree.
Gaia: the planet behaves like a cornered animal.

And the Yeti play hide-and-seek, or hide-and-hide.
Not everything wants to be known.

About the author

Devon Miller-Duggan has had poems appear in Rattle, Shenandoah, Margie, Christianity and Literature, The Indiana Review, Harpur Palate, The Hollins Critic. She’s won an Academy of American Poets Prize, a grant and a fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts, an editor’s prize in Margie, honorable mention in Rattle. She teaches for the Department of English at the University of Delaware. Her first book, Pinning the Bird to the Wall appeared from Tres Chicas Books in November 2008. Her chapbook of off-kilter poems about angels, Neither Prayer, Nor Bird is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.