Poetry | Forest fire // Walking with dinosaurs


It begins for the same reasons:
spark, air and ready material, grassless
under conifer. You
study a wax diorama of the soon-to-be
Antarctic jungle, ornithischian
dinosaurs—eating a plastic fern—named
after Qantas; you’re exhuming
the bones of an Airbus A330 beside
the Pteranodons, angelic actinofibrils
stretched overhead like cherubs/principalities
a model beak, a reconstructed lack
of fangs. The sky is humid with not-dinosaurs,
unseasonable amounts of methane
in the troposphere, parting gift of the last mass
extinction. Something lumpen provides matches
like a teen rebel. The Diplodocus sniff
the trail of smoke, audience thinks oh shit fire is still
real, even here … The creche tastes the air
    —The erotic tension between a name and
fossilising—You may watch skin/hair almost turning
scaled in heat. Kenneth Branagh narrates Thanks
to their size, the closeness of prehistoric forests
they can only amble, as the red approaches.

Jocelyn Deane

Josie/Jocelyn Suzanne is a freelance editor/programmer living in Naarm (Melbourne). Their work has appeared in various journals, including Overland, Australian Poetry, SCUM magazine and Rabbit journal. They were one the recipients for the 2020 Queensland Poetry Festival Ekphrasis prize. They are non-binary.

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

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