To the Saber-Toothed Tiger Cub Found in the Permafrost // Eliza Marley
When your eyes open again, it will be with glass and wood wool, foreign fiber coaxing the ghosts of orbital muscles back to full roundness, how you might have looked at your mother when feeding from her or basking in the sunlight, your claws not yet sprouted and your fangs not yet seasoned, unable to sink down, into the earth, birthed and interred where soil becomes pressed into itself, making more space for your body, downy soft like a womb, how the ice cradled you through your long slumber, many things have died since then, and we have all moved on to walk above them, the drawings we’ve made have forgotten the curves of a jaw softened with rest, how you might have yawned and curled your limbs to make yourself small and warm, they will place you in a neutral position, touched with carefully gloved hands reaching to part the follicles of your fur and wonder what winds ruffled them, and when they might return again for us, many things have melted since then, and your skin is thicker than ours and better suited for hard winters, the space between bones still remembers the pull of the joint when the weather changes, what shape will it take, a hole, a cavern, a burrow, so much time sits between the small roof of your mouth, and your petrified tongue is lax, there is nothing left to say, but they will still ask you, not how the grass smelled, or if it grew at all, many things are still melting and we wait for them to reveal to us what we still have left to lose, would you explain to us what it all looks like from inside, would you tell us, do you feel saved?
Eliza Marley is the author of the book, You Shouldn't Worry About the Frogs (Querencia Press, 2023). Her work has been featured in Red Ogre Review, Chaotic Merge Magazine, and Stoneboat Journal, among others. Eliza is a PhD student in Chicago, where she studies climate fiction and ghost stories. She can often be found haunting the Chicago River in a kayak herself.