Anastasia Nikolis

The Island Aubades

Menorca, Spain

I. After the island effect

Islands exaggerate.
Hippos shrink to the size of goats
and rats grow to rival cats because
in the absence of threat creatures develop
unique characteristics. 

Insularity breeds new strangeness
and perhaps new possibility
because every island is different.
But they are also all the same—
every island teaches its creatures
to prepare for extinction. Every island
teaches its creatures
they aren’t made for this world.

II. Nuralagus rex

In this light,
the sun low in the sky,
we can see best the curves of the spine.
Dusty from fresh excavation,
they look like stones until articulated
as they were inside two flanks. Look—
a barely-there bend
in the cervical bones. Then,
a long arc from thoracic to lumbar spine to tail.
Lacking a typical backbone,
they say this giant rabbit couldn’t hop. Lacking
a typical skull—there’s an extra space in front—
it couldn’t hear well. Or see.
It lumbered slow like women
on the beach, naked
but for their typical confidence,
breasts swinging from backbones
evolved for ease of movement
from mountain to coast to sea.

III. Myotragus balearicus

Across from the café
three girls are eating lollipops
red, blue, red on a bench.
Their mothers carry straw purses,
big enough to carry something significant
but shaped so they are about to spill,
tipping like boats on arms waving to tables—
hola hola bon dia.
It’s so easy to forget
there weren’t always people in this world
on this island. Five thousand years ago
when the first boats arrived
there was only a strange goat
with teeth like a rat and short legs
that made it easy to climb
but difficult to run. It watched the boats
arrive with eyes facing straight ahead
in its skull because of naïve evolution.
So trusting, so unaware of hunters
pursuing it from behind.
                                    Now,
I am the mouse goat
walking away from you each morning
without looking back.

IV. Bovina menorquina

The big sky
sags heavy in the middle. The pastures swell up to meet it,
earth heaped over the heart of something forgotten.
At the top of the hill, under a stand of olive trees,
there are silent cows.
They move like clouds, suddenly looming and close,
challenging gravity with their bulk. They look too big for the hill.
The hill looks too small for the sky.
Today
the sun slipped into an opaque pocket
and people working the field don’t retreat
to shade under the trees. They say
it’s a promising morning
because there is no sun. I wonder
if it’s the end of this world or wisdom
won from experience?
The bones found
under all that earth remind us
anywhere is home until it isn’t.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Anastasia Nikolis is an Assistant Professor of English at St. John Fisher University. Her academic research focuses on confession and secrecy in post-1945 American poetry, with special interest in poetry and the public humanities. In her creative writing, she explores the intersections of visual art, place and the body. You can find her work in Stone Canoe, Ghost City Review, Arkansas International and Tampa Review.