Margaret M Kelly

Fact Patterns Supporting the Existence of Dragons

We’re responsible for star-charts and dog-whistles and pop rocks.
We’ve mapped the genome down to beach lanes and roundabouts.
We’ve split atoms and wiped out polio. We put two singing rovers

on Mars. And yet, severed feet wash up on Pacific shores. We find
human skulls in hollowed-out elm trees. Jumbo jets vanish
on flawless days over glassy seas.

And one otherwise unremarkable 20th century morning, an explosion
the force of one thousand atomic bombs flattened 80 million trees
in the Siberian wild completely out of the blue.

II.

We can’t confirm what happened at Dyatlov’s Pass. We don’t know why
we dream. Colossal rocks stand hulking on far-flung islands
in formations we can’t explain. The Bermuda Triangle keeps its secrets.

In two millennia, we’ve not found Cleopatra. Light eludes us, too, slyly
shape-shifting - wave, particle. Every now and then, one of us bursts
into flame.

There may be Yetis in the Himalayas, and Sasquatches roving
the Pacific Northwest, and a tusked dinosaur surviving
in the Congo River basin.

III.

There are Howlers in the Ozarks. Leviathans sleep in our darkest lakes.
The stars are burning. The forests are burning. My grandfather still swims
past the breakers. I can see tomorrow in the creek-beds of his hands.

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Margaret M Kelly is entering her final semester at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, in pursuit of her MFA in Poetry. She graduated from Princeton University in 2010 and the University of Virginia School of Law in 2015. She practiced corporate law briefly in DC before pivoting back to her true love—writing. Her poetry has appeared in Hanging Loose and she was a co-editor and contributing author of a law of war anthology called Lifting the Fog of War: New Thinking about War and War Prevention.