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Soft-Bodied Animals Leave Few Traces 
by Mitchell Jacobs

in the fossil record. Millennia of sea anemones
     lost, their ghost lineages as branched
     as their tender, unkeepable bodies.
We remember bone, tooth, shell,

     chitinous exoskeleton. The hard parts.
     Whatever’s stiff enough to displace mud.
A spine’s archipelago. I bend over
     in this Utah heat, feeling the earth’s vendetta

     against flesh, which it punishes
and punishes then decomposes.
     I unstrap my tools, trowel or brush,
     to use as the rock dictates.

I had imagined grief to be the trilobite,
     many-segmented and ubiquitous.
     Extinction’s logo. They are shrines
from the tough earth to its fierce loves

     more mineral than animal.
     Where is the tilde of an earthworm
that tilled the soil with its entire innards?
     A squid’s roving, buoyant eyeball?

     The earth will save my hunched skeleton
but not the tapeworm that squirms inside me
     of its own volition: delicate ribbon
     as long and tangled as hunger. Or joy.

"Soft-Bodied Animals Leave Few Traces" by Mitchell Jacobs. Used by permission of the poet.