It doesn’t take too much to forget: Leave the Bramble Cay Melomys out of the next dictionary. Those rats are already dead, homes wiped out by rising tides. Not many know their name, same as the Kittlitz’s Murrelet. No kid dreams of seeing the Murrelet’s mottled body blending into the sea spotted with sunlight. It’s safe to delete them too. If the name’s not in textbooks, postcards, or magazines, no one will know to search. Move the erasures more and more inland, low tide dragging away wolf spiders and honeycreepers, Sierra Nevada Blues and golden toads. Readers won’t learn how far the damage’s gone— just keep erasing. Afterall, people forgot they once could be singular. Victorians hid that under grammatical change so keep erasing until nothing remains but a white sea.
Emma Ginader is a bisexual poet and editor from northeastern Pennsylvania. She recently graduated from Columbia University with an MFA in writing. Her poetry has appeared in The Moth Magazine, Vox Viola, december, The Rational Creature, and FU Review [Berlin]. She has work forthcoming in Mantis, Lavender Review, great weather for MEDIA, and They Call Us. Ginader previously worked as the online poetry editor for the Columbia Journal and as the social media editor & business reporter for The Daily Item newspaper in central Pennsylvania. Find her Twitter account, @EmmaGinader.
South Broadway Ghost Society 