Poetry, Writing, and LituratureMusic Production Writers, Artists, and Editors

Staff

REGISTER FREE

Advertise

Search

Home

Browse our archives for previously published authors and artists Featured Submitted Poetry Featured Submitted Fiction Featured Submitted Non-Fiction Submit your work/writings for review Visit our online discussion board Recommended books by our published writers Search our Artists, Writers, Poets, and Products from our original artwork gallery with just one click Fine art and products available for purchase online. Browse the many paintings and photographs currently being sold. Current events in the authoring/literary/publishing community. The audio/video media section will be completed shortly. Return Home - reading, writing, artists, featured artwork, literary community, paintings, and much much more!

Sarah Lindsay
Poetry
Slow Butterflies in the Luminous Field  

In this kennel you'll see our most popular cross:
golden retriever with Red Delicious apple.
The apple genes make 'em glossy and calm
and symmetrical.  They travel well,
don't jump, don't run around, don't bark.
Frankly, we didn't expect their teeth
to be so soft, but they do just fine on mush.
Handsome, aren't they?

                              Down that hall
are miniature poodles with parrot genes.
Bright blue with yellow eyes.  The night shift
taught this batch to say Help!  I'm being held prisoner
in a fortune cookie factory!
It was funny the first hundred times.

This room will be for hamster turtles.
The pet stuff may not change the world,
but we can't do that without income, right?

Now in this paddock we're saving the rhino
by making it woolly again.  With vicuna genes,
it's relatively docile, it's fluffy, lots of square footage--
mark my words, rhino fleece will be hot.
And look at those Bambi eyes--who goes on safari
to shoot a cream puff like this?

Most of our projects are in development.
In here we're working with kudzu genes in silkworms
to increase the output and tensile strength,
but so far we've only doubled their appetite.
And the spider-barnacle thing has yielded
intriguing results, but nothing we're ready to publish.

But out here--you should see this field in the evening
when we let the butterflies out.
Looks like ordinary tobacco, doesn't it,
but those leaves are making insulin as we speak.
We also incorporated a jellyfish gene.
That's for the butterflies, which are part slow loris--
that way they can't start hurricanes by fluttering,
or migrate to where the forests used to be.
When the butterflies turned out nocturnal, too,
we figured we'd make the tobacco plants glow in the dark.

At night they give off a pale green light,
and bow their heads, from a bluebell cross I think,
to be pollinated more easily,
and the butterflies walk in slow motion up the stalks.
Their wings open and close every minute or so,
maybe they think they're flying.  And the plants
move their leaves a little, too,
as if they were shifting in a summer breeze,
as if there were any more breezes.

Writer Bio

Sarah Lindsay is the author of Primate Behavior (Grove Press, 1997), a National Book Award Finalist. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines, including The New Republic, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is the recipient of the Randall Jarrell Scholarship awarded by the University of North Carolina.

Sarah.Lindsay@paceco.com
Other Pedestal Published Works






Features
Thomas Lux
Tantra Bensko
Interviews
Interview with Thomas Lux
Poetry
Barbara Hendryson - Wicked Grace
Bruce Boston - Hypertexts
Carol Carpenter - Betrayal
Carolyn Adams - Flowers
Charles Fishman - Jake, Sleeping
Corrine De Winter - Close to Holiness
Jessica Smucker Falcon - The Rivers Turned to Blood
Martina Newberry - Secret History
Richard Jordan - To the Schoolgirl On the Amusement Ride
Sheila K. Smith - Langston's Tune
Susan Ludvigson - When the Flag Goes Up
Susan Ludvigson - Amnesia
Susan Terris - Michael Mazur: Ice Glen, 1993
Suzanne Frischkorn - Panther & Bathing Suit
Fiction
Mike Golden - Experience The Cheap Thrill of Tibet (Excerpt from Selling Out: Everything Must Go)
Non-Fiction
Jennifer M. Wilson - Gray Matter

Submit

Staff

Register FREE

Advertise

Search

Home


All Rights Reserved , Copyright © 1996 - 2001 The Pedestal Magazine