after Leonora Carrington’s “How Doth the Little Crocodile”
carried her still-translucent baby girls on her back, floated through the X-
walk. She’d been careful to lay her moon green eggs in cooler mud. She
wanted girls. She wanted them to have vertical cat-eye
pupils. She called her nest of crocodile eggs her crèche
and heard her babies call out from inside the shells.
The snout of a crocodile is a capital letter V and
their language can be the language of a bird if hungry, of a snake
if afraid. If in love or in distress, a deep cough from the groin. Her man-
croc’s cry was infrasonic, so deep she felt it on her white belly scales.
Too subtle, even for me. But this all sounds like my myth of the afterlife,
like a warm wet dream during the cold,
cold mating season when I’d have to bite and be bitten, and could
finally descend back down to the peaceful muddy river bank.
