By Lisa Bellamy

Featured Art by Evelyn De Morgan

I shudder when I think of the giant beavers—
tiny-brained, squinting Pleistocene thugs—
they bared rotting incisors longer than a human arm,
they infested ponds and rivers, smothered
gasping sh with their acid-spiked, toxic urine,
they slapped their murderous tails—bleating,
they dragged themselves up the riverbank,
spied sweetgrass; they charged the crawling babies,
the tiny baby bones, trampling, they didn’t care—
hurray for the naked, fierce, yelling Stone Age grannies—
they dropped their hammer stones, they grabbed
sharp sticks. Who can forget their skinny, bouncing breasts?
They beat the giant beavers, they speared; they smeared
hot, thick beaver blood over each other’s faces,
their bony, serviceable buttocks—who can forget the grannies—

Lisa Bellamy teaches at The Writers Studio and studies with Philip Schultz. Her poetry collection, The Northway, is forthcoming from Terrapin Books. Her chapbook, Nectar, won The Aurorean chapbook prize in 2011. Bellamy’s writing has appeared in The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Massachusetts Review, Hotel Amerika, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and The Sun, among other publications. She received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention and a Fugue Poetry Prize. She lives in Brooklyn and the Adirondacks.