Poetry By Natalie Wolf

Will Fisher CC




If my friend does not want 54 ugly cake pops

I’ll tell her I’ll give them to the other
grad students. I’ll tell her grad students
are like chickens. Throw us free food, and
watch us go nuts. Toss us a headless snake
and watch us tear the meat from the bones
till our beaks are shiny with blood. We used
to be dinosaurs. Velociraptors. All we really want
is to hear that we’re clever girls. We have seen
what seemed like the end of the world and
adapted to survive. Like chickens, we have
extensive vocabularies. Are here to fuck
with the gender binary. Don’t sweat, can’t
swim. We never really bathe, just roll around
in the dust and call it good enough. We can
run up to nine miles an hour. We can’t see
what’s directly in front of us, but we can
remember up to one hundred faces. Every
student from two years past. We like even
numbers. See “neurodivergence.” Some of us
can scream for a minute straight. Some of us
won’t survive the summer, the winter,
the cruelest months. We can be incapable
of tasting sweetness. Only the ever-present
taint of the bitter. But we do form stable
social groups. We are learning to recognize
ourselves, our own names. And we are
specialized: long tails, feathered feet, laying
bright blue eggs. Birthing new ideas on the daily,
speaking to them softly through the shells:
grow, emerge, sing. Offering them up, still wet
and downy, for examination. And this one?
Good enough? Wondering what will happen
if one day we don’t deliver. Waking up with
our heads on the chopping block. We recognize
that we are part of a pecking order. We have learned
to do tricks, perform when and as prompted. Some
of us have been known to eat our young. More
protein, less competition. But we don’t do that
anymore. I promise. We love to cuddle, purr
like cats. Dream. Some days, we walk around
with brains half-asleep. Sleep with one eye
open. We can smell danger from afar. And
we know you think we can’t fly. But we
are evolved from creatures of the jungle,
and just when you think you have us
cornered, we will soar higher than you
ever believed, cackling down from
the tops of the trees. Clever girls.
Clever girls.

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Natalie Wolf is a writer from the Kansas City area pursuing an MFA in creative writing at the University of Kansas. She is an editor for One Sentence Poems and a reader for Cottonwood Literary Magazine. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in Short Story, Long; The Hooghly Review; I-70 Review; and more. You can find her on her website (https://nwolfmeep.wixsite.com/nmwolf) and on Instagram @nwolfcats.