Read More: A Q&A with Audrey Hall
Flyby
Off the coast of Canada, a 500-year-old relic
carries shark pups gestated for 18 years.
Particles of ice and dead things flurry past
her blank-lensed eyes.
Sonorously, the world moves.
She doesn’t mind that the moon Europa has oceans
sixty miles deep. She readies to give birth
after years of patience,
discovery transcendent as Earth takes
pictures of Europa’s opal-white oceans.
She doesn’t mind space’s uncertainty.
The cold is the same: crippling
but for the flex of her soft vertebrae.
She doesn’t mind that the Europa Clipper is longer
than a basketball court.
She doesn’t mind that her family predates bones.
Sleeping Girl
– After Dod Procter’s painting c.1927
Cissie crossed the fisherman’s wharf and left
behind her father’s beetle-browed stare to
pose in an artist’s bed. No chemisette,
just her neck and muscled arms cast in blue
overtones, cool like Marmara marble,
like the pale striations of the painting
she lied for, eyes closed to the loose handful
of pillow catching light in a faint sheen.
The artist’s home was quiet: no shipyard
hollering, no wood-creaks, no sailor song.
Cissie slept to the sound of oil paint stirred,
while the future eye of the artist saw
her next idea: a pair of doves, or just
the one young bird, held shy beneath the breast.
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Ode to the Giant Ground Sloth
under whose fossil replica I slept […]
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Audrey Hall is a poet, literature scholar, and megafauna enthusiast from Mississippi. Her poems are published and forthcoming in the minnesota review, Raleigh Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, and others. Her work has been anthologized in the Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. X: Alabama and was nominated for Best of the Net Awards in 2022 and 2025.
Read More: A Q&A with Audrey Hall