One Poem by Michael Hettich

Extinction

The creature my mother had been once was hiding
in a supermarket magazine photograph, as though
she were a stylish shoe; the animal my father
had fancied as himself, was howling at the moon
like the wolf in that famous ad campaign
that taught us how to act wild and stylish at once,
like a new kind of gesture. We had lost all the creatures
that weren’t of our ilk, like we’d lost certain aunts
and uncles to their snapshots. And then we started losing
those animals inside us, as our sleep started dreaming
in languages of follicle and cuticle, fingernail
and ear wax, sand and snot. Until something
moved around inside again, wilder than we’d ever been
and almost as vivid as the world, and it hurt
like language must have done once, or maybe even love.