Consider Ichnology
I learned in class today that Ichnology
[ noun. - ik-nol′o-ji - ]
is the study of life
is the study of traces of life.
In Bolivia, there is a limestone cliff
hosting bones put on display by a wall
of vertical footprints. It’s called the Cal
Orcko. I could count 5,000 dinosaur
footprints, which is to say that I could go
back in time and study the new ichnology,
the new present, which I could say is the same
as the Jurassic, but I’d be wrong
because the Jurassic isn’t the same as the Late
Cretaceous. Cretaceous reminds me of my dad,
not because he’s old, which he is,
but because of the phonetics in Christopher. I met
a grandma in France once, she told me
how to make children cry in Syria, which is to say
that all you’d need to do is point a camera at them.
My favorite dinosaur as a child was the Deinonychus,
the ones they based the velociraptor in Jurassic Park
on because they wanted to scare the children, and who
could be afraid of a chicken-sized dinosaur? I used to run
from two-month-old puppies when I was four, scared
they’d eat me alive in one single chomp like the Deinonychus,
or the T Rex, or the Carcharodontosaurus. Did you know
that some children cry at the sight of a dachshund?
Learned that when I was four. When I was five,
I lived in New York for a year. My mother
was scared I’d get sick from the cold,
from the people, from the mice,
from the rats. Scared I’d die
in my hospital bed with nurses dotting
me, dusting my bones with tubes and devices
to study my trace of life. The study of Ichnology
is the study of New York, the city, I mean,
where my lover is, prodding specimens at the American
Museum of Natural History, which is to say that I’m gay,
because in his eyes I saw canyons, I mean, I saw Cal Orcko.
O the dinosaurs.
He took a photo of me and I screamed.
What’s in it? There was him and me,
him throwing a grapevine into the ceiling
fan and then there were fireworks, bones
clustering together under a slide of tectonic
plates, a meteor and a flash of light, lifted
into the air on display for paleontologists
and / Godly / people to argue our ichnology.
Zachery Noah Rahn is a Writing & Linguistics senior at Georgia Southern University. He is a queer poet that enjoys reading about insects, watching horror movies, and spending time with his dog. When Zach isn’t writing poems about ants, he can be found in the candy aisle at the nearest grocery store.