Stegosaurus Sophie

You don’t see me, do you?

So carefully posed in parched contempt.

This is survival beyond injury and death,

all these plates and spikes. This

figure bowed, face downcast towards a thin layer

of painted yellow Wyoming soil.

Erected on a mount of plaster and wire

lost foreleg given an invisible prosthetic,

tail attached with a hinge to swing it back and forth.

Deinos! The terrible, fearful lizard: Stegosaurus Sophie—

they named me, after the daughter of the fellow

who owned the land I died on before man existed

to dig up and blaspheme me.

Me. The monster deigned to remain aloft

on dry cracked claws and unbleeding needs.

The sensation of crumbling dust within

and without that festering of long ago longing.

Back when my stagnant form laid cooly

beneath each newly dead carcass.

It startled me, being unearthed, and again

preserved now in plaster, behind glass,

jaw hanging loose and silent,

optic canals gaping, enclosed in such a

carefully ventilated, temperature-controlled world,

made elemental in the indignity

of my involuntary, haunting immortality.

Someday these walls of man shall fall down around

this petrified body. I know this. Maybe a

thousand years from now— not long— with my bones

caked in dead human skin dust.

I pray that when the time comes, a quaking aspen may

take Sophie within its slithering roots and crush her.

After millions of years,

these atoms will disperse again.

I’ll sigh from within the soft basin clay.

The entropic oneness of God, cradling me

again, again, again. Please.

Until then I wait, reposed before your eyes—

as they flit quickly over my exhibit,

and on to the next.