Fossils
1. I heard they draw dinosaurs scarier than they probably actually were. Which is to say, it’s interesting that we make a monster out of what’s lost, so we let go of it more easily. Or maybe we make foreign what we don’t understand, so we feel better about not understanding it. 2. In a fossil there is bone. When something hurts, it cuts “to the bone.” What’s left is the structure and what has hit us hardest. They ask what’s hit me hardest, or where it hurts the worst. I say I don’t know. 3. Did they mean to give us their selves? And who are we to be greedy with them? 4. Pressure creates fossils. Can we press without pushing? Can we save without turning up the heat, get to a heart without melting to stone? Or child in a house, bread in the cabinet, a small warm animal in hand? 5. People remembered get twisted. 6. Maybe holding is changing. To pull it out in futures that sweat & breathe different air. In a universe expanding, we have never been in the same place twice. 7. What I Can’t Let Go Of: 1. This headache 2. The tiny garbage in my “can of small things” 3. My need for it all to “work out” 8. Things worth having are things worth lasting, no?
Luna Dragon Mac-Williams is a writer, actor, dancer, jeweler, and arts educator that roots her work in radical compassion and joy. She teaches theater, writing, and their intersection with activism through After School Matters in her hometown of Chicago. She is an undergraduate student of theater, education, and writing at Wesleyan University, and a semi-finalist for Definition Theater’s 2020 Amplify festival. Her poetry has been published in SWWIM, Inverted Syntax, Flying Ketchup, Seven Circle, Funicular, and Ariel’s Dream. She is a nominee for the 2020 Pushcart Prize.
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