Questioning Ankylosaurus Over Dinner
If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would you choose?
Oh, great belly. Great armored skull.
Let’s start from the beginning: tell me
whether it was a meteor or a kinder form of dying.
Whether it descended like an aging god.
It is always the most beautiful things
with the greatest capacity for destruction.
Its mouth opening like a grave,
the slip of a lie. Oh, great bent lizard. Yesterday
I stayed up late to watch a meteor shower.
All of these little dyings came splitting
out of the sky. I felt I could be content with any
consequence: the plumes of winter; a body
of ash heaved into the air—as if to replace
what had just rained down with a greater beast.
Oh, great fused breath. Tell me about the womb
of rock. What it was like, being born too early
to escape your own shadow, the delicate
curve of the meteor’s path. The ground
slow to hold you. The ground, the very thing
you tasted when scared and pressed your stomach
against like a prayer, forgetting what it means to touch.
And so we thought you held many bodies.
That your body wasn't your own.
It is always the most beautiful things
which cannot belong to themselves.
Oh, great armor. Tell me what it felt
like to be found by something unable to understand you.
To be known in absence of your aggression.
Tell me about what it felt like to die.
Whether it was beautiful enough to offset
the loss of a body. Oh, great empty. We are still trying
to pull you back together. One day,
we’ll get it right. One day, I’ll stop seeing myself reflected
in the unfamiliarity of your form;
in the heave of knowing that one day, everything might go.
Oh, great ending. Tell me how to go
about making the most of life before
the meteor—that aging god, that aching
body—is no longer beautiful enough
to justify the fall.
Kyla Guimaraes
Kyla Guimaraes is a writer and student from New York City. Her work can be found in SUNHOUSE Literary, The Penn Review, HAD, Dishsoap Quarterly, and elsewhere. Kyla is an alum of the Iowa Young Writers' Studio, a poetry editor at Eucalyptus Lit, and a poetry reader at Okay Donkey. In addition to writing, she likes puns, the rain, and reading Wikipedia articles about various animals (including dinosaurs).
Why this knocked Taylor out:
I mean obviously I am the target audience for this kind of poem. If you throw a dinosaur in a poem that also uses the words "womb" "little dyings" and "prayer", it's almost an auto accept.
Okay, sorry let me be serious. The elegiac nature of this poem, written to an extinct being, while also commenting on the state of humanity and our failing connection to each other is brilliant. The repetition of "Oh great" which is then complicated through the variations of what is great (armor, belly, empty) also add a chanting and prayer-like feeling to this holy and wonderful poem. Mix that in with some powerful rhetorical questions and you’ve got a brilliant powerful poem.
Not to mention, and I’m stealing this phrase from Martheaus and will probably steal it again in the future, you could put your finger anywhere down on this poem at random and have a banger line.
I don’t know sometimes when I try to write this I just fail with my words. This is a beautiful poem that speaks for itself and I think if you haven’t already read it several times you should go back up and read it SEVERAL more times.
Interview:
What was the onus for writing this poem? What spurred your pen to page to create this? and what did the revision process look like?
This is a poem that I wrote with the specific intention of submitting to BRAWL Lit. I normally don’t write poems with a particular home in mind; this was very much an exception. When I first read the BRAWL Lit submission guidelines, I was really excited by the idea of writing a dinosaur poem and sending it to Taylor, and I knew I wanted to follow through on that impulse. I also really admired BRAWL Lit’s mission and means (choose your own editor, interviews with publication, easter eggs on website, etc). From there, it was just a matter of figuring out which dinosaur I wanted to write about and what I wanted to say. Everything I write is a product of my context at the moment of writing it; as I look back on this poem, there are a lot of specific ideas I was thinking about (meteor showers, icebreaker questions, details particular to the history of ankylosauruses) housed within the broader urge to write about mortality.
I work in bursts of inspiration. When I have a specific idea or thing I know I need to write about, my process tends to be super quick (ie. a day). I tend to only be proud of and submit poems that come from periods of inspiration like this. With “Questioning Ankylosaurus Over Dinner,” the initial idea felt clear, but the process of fleshing that out was much slower. Usually I get impatient with poems that feel like they need a lot of work to turn into something I’m proud of, but I was willing to sit with this one for as long as needed, which was a nice feeling and new approach. My approach to revision was one of trying to find balance between writing and giving that writing space. I would find myself returning to the poem every so often to add something or move sections around, and then leaving it alone for a while. The question of form was among the last things I considered during the revision process as I found myself moving closer to finalizing this piece.
How does this fit within the stuff you normally write?
For all that the process of writing this poem differed from my typical approach, the content and end product feel very similar to what I usually write. If I were to characterize my current writing, there are two things that feel pretty constant: (1) a piling of ideas/images/words that can at times feel excessive, and (2) the act of writing in pursuit of answering a question. This poem feels like one that embodies both of those approaches.
If you could have one famous poet read this poem and love it, who would it be and why?
Todd Dillard. I absolutely love his work. Like, if I tried to explain everything I love about both his approach to writing and the writing he’s publishing, this would go on for wayyyyy too long. In
specific, I really admire how his writing uses a premise/details/ideas/etc that is strange or unusual and then shows how that premise/details/ideas/etc is inherently poetic. He’s completely revolutionized the way I think about poetry, and, generally speaking, has just been a huge inspiration for how I’m approaching writing.
“Questioning Ankylosaurus Over Dinner,” though certainly less unconventional than some of the other stuff I’ve written, is trying to do this same task of taking a strange premise/details and, through exploration and writing, making it poetic.