Trailer Park Paleontology with Microplastics
with a line from Dr. Alan Grant
by Victoriano Cárdenas
Digging for neck bones and teeth, scattering from the excavation
site when trucks needed to pass, or from the Oviraptor in the trailer
at the end of the lot. We brushed the dust off these bottlecaps, thimbles,
fossils as mysterious and foreign as amber-coated mosquitoes, or families
on TV with dinner tables and everyone in their assigned seat, bed frames
and Barney pajamas, Jurassic Park in surround sound, an armed alarm system.
Us kids didn’t attend fossil camp in Montana, or know such a thing
even existed, but we knew there must be something in the rock, aside
from long-necked bottles, the whispered prayers woven over us as we slept.
Finally, a car stalled out in the big hole after a rainstorm, and sank
through the bottom of rut into a puddle of slick oil, hood roaring open,
guzzling and stomping its cinder block feet the entire time it was dying.
The dinosaurs never left, they’re still roaming the earth, tumbling
from pipes and chutes, chopped by waves and shredders and plows,
small and insidious and millions of them, with as many sharp edges.
I guess it’s nice to know they are always with us, always have been,
meeting us halfway in our cups, our old toys, the ones we replaced them with,
and in the air and the earth, and our cars, our bloodstreams, our field of vision.
And if you were afraid of a hundred giant teeth, imagine a billion tiny ones
because you are alive when they start to eat you—
so maybe show a little respect?