After the Hereafter
We interview the de-extinction candidates. Afterwards,
they linger in a waiting room preening wings, tapping
hooves, snacking on chips from vending machines,
pawing disinterestedly through Time and People magazines
while we sequence their genomes, fashioning squiggles
of DNA. It’s a qualified pool: the cave bear, the dodo—
plants too, the Rapa Nui palm propped near a window,
guzzling sunshine, adjusting luxurious fronds. We rifle
through resumes. We need a reason for each species.
This one could eat invasive bugweed or reduce climate
change marginally. What if we released a population
of passenger pigeons by 2030? All dead creatures must
yearn for life, its appetite, its radiant pangs. A little longer,
we promise. We are deliberating, calibrating technology.
Let’s not repeat our past failings like the Pyrenean ibex,
whose last living member, Celia, we discovered crushed
under a tree in January 2000. Three years later, her cloned
baby pranced from our waiting room back into the world,
revitalized once more: a fantasy of blood and slime, legs
kicking, until mere minutes after birth, she died, her feeble,
improbable body still steaming with warmth, her eyes wide.
Kristin Emanuel is a PhD candidate at Washington University in St. Louis. Her debut poetry collection, Birdwatching in the 4th Dimension, was selected by Shann Ray as the winner of the 2025 Emma Howell Rising Poet Prize. Her poems have appeared in Ecotone, Boston Review, and Poetry Northwest.
Pyrenean ibex illustration by Joseph Wolf, courtesy Animalia. Header photo by Engin Akyurt, courtesy Pixabay.
