Tiger

by Eric Robertson

There are 500 of my kind out there. Maybe less. 420.
You can understand why I'm defensive.
Pick my teeth with knife. Give an evil eye.
Just 420 of my brothers and sisters. My ma?
I don't know where she is.
Her fingers ornamenting someone's neck maybe.

So you can see I'm touchy.

Siberia is beautiful in the winter.
Birch trees all striped against the snow.
You can imagine a clear day.
An orange sunset against this.

I don't think about blood the way you do. That's for sure.
The earth spins me upside down.
I hear all the creatures that were.
So distant now. A trail of animal crackers.
A circus of silhouettes frozen on the horizon.
Crows picking the crumbs.
My memory like your childhood. That old.

Tony the Tiger selling cereal. Exxon gas.
Black Sambo a fictional friend. We all have beliefs.

I don't wear a white cloth bib when I carve my meat. None of that.
Not what you would call civilized. No no.
No factory farming. No conveyer belt.

I don't see blood like that.
Little drops rolling around some Styrofoam plate
wrapped in plastic. Red meat laying on absorbing pads. No.
When I see it I'm in it.
I hear it.
That's the closest I get to metal.
All that iron.
I hear it bubbling through my teeth through a clamped trachea.
I wear it on my forehead.
A giant bindi for my cousins in Bengal.

Martha

by Eric Robertson

A person could feel small looking at those great big flocks. When I was a boy in the 1850s they flew over for hours. A mile wide and a hundred miles long. The jungle got right in yer veins just watchin' 'em. It was a damn sight. Evenin'-like. The whole sun gone. Just a little light around the edges.

And they only knew how to mate in great numbers. They couldn't get their juices up if they weren’t smellin' the air full of themselves for a hundred miles. That was their problem. There couldn’t ever a been an Adam and Eve. God must have thrown a batch of 'em down already winged.

Talk about wilderness. They were in the trees ever'where and they had so many nests they looked like berries on a bush. Those little eggs fed every crow and fox in the forest. Weren't enough natural enemies to eat 'em all. The crow and fox started having dinner together like they weren't natural born enemies themself. And those ladies in the trees just kept laying eggs one after another.

The hunters would build a campfire beneath 'em. Soak grain in sourmash for 'em to eat and then catch 'em floppin around drunk. Then they'd pinch there little heads between fingers like a farmer goin' down a row pinchin' potato bugs.

But now there gone. This year, 1914, has seen the last. Now I wish I could see those black clouds that went on forever. Now there's too much sun. The skies too lonely. All that lights on us with no blessed relief. We're naked now with out 'em. They was the clothing. More'n just a feather for a ladies hat.

The poor folk ate 'em… and the hogs. And some men made millions off 'em. Men who paid for colleges and had universities named after themselves. But all they could do was name the last pigeon Martha, after the first "first lady". When it was too late, that was the best they could do to relieve their conscious. As if that last girl was not just a walking zombie that didn't have more use with this world than an eraser at the end of a pencil. Seems like they could have come up with something better. What's a good name for the last lady? Enid? Nevermore?

When I was a boy we sang "A Friend of the Earth is a Friend to Me". I guess there not singin' that song in school anymore.

Hear that chuggin' off in the distance? That's the factory. Hiding the sun with all that black smoke. Kind of like the passenger pigeons. Except the air was good with the passenger pigeons. A billion wings all flappin' at once.

California Delta Smelt

by Eric Robertson

Hey! Listen to Me!

I am a CALIFORNIA DELTA SMELT and I am tired of all these big ass, dangerous, just plain WEIRD creatures getting all the attention.

I mean do you have to be a whale to get saved?

All you people want is biggest, fastest, most dangerous, MAN-EATING!
It all sounds like some cheap porn site to me.

So the blue whale has a heart as big as a Volkswagon beetle
and the green mamba's bite will kill a man in seven seconds.
Does everything have to be in the Guiness Book of World Records for someone to pay attention? I mean do you actually have any idea how hard it is to lay 2000 eggs?

So I've Caused Some Trouble
and people can't use their jet skis everywhere
and farmers can't grow watermelons in the desert.
Well whoop te do! Is anybody dying over it?

I guess I should! That is what you'd like, huh?
If I just laid down and died.
You'd like to see my little white belly floating on top, wouldn't you?
Let's just forget about MY ANCESTORS and the millions and millions of
generations came before ME!

This is all about YOU!
Getting' the water YOU need
getting' the water for YOUR party pontoons,
to grow YOUR geraniums, to take YOUR warm, soothing,
two-hour-long BATHS.

This is all about YOU and that beautiful, crystal-clear, twice-scrubbed
water YOU NEED to flush down YOUR doo-doos.

I'm just a fishy little SMELT.
Go ahead forget me.You've got Shamu and Coco
and your cute little Ling-ling.

Watch your tv reruns of
Steve Irwin grabbing snakes by the tail
dangling his baby in front of alligators.
See if I care!

You just do what you do and never-mind exterminating me.
I'm just a little California delta smelt.