Wenatchee, Washington
“He wouldn’t make us like monkeys!”
says a student in the front row.
“’Cause he made us in His image.”
She laughs and turns to check
for smiles and nods. The professor
stands by the whiteboard
where he has written the word
adaptation. He’s thinking of all
the lessons, like similes,
that have appeared in black ink
across this space,
and that have, like species,
gone. He cannot help
but see her in the church van
on the field trip, pretending
she doesn’t know she’s the pretty one
who doesn’t know exactly
what’s happening inside the boy
beside her when she tosses
her pink-streaked hair and blows
a word across his ear. In the room’s silence,
she shows them what she means
by turning her hands into big ears
and wagging her head.
They wonder what sort
of experiment they are as their professor
turns off the lights and clicks
a chimp’s face onto the screen.
No one says a thing
at the god looking back
from those brown, sad eyes.
This poem first appeared in Through the Second Skin (Orchises Press, 2013).
—
Derek Sheffield is the eighth poet laureate of Washington State (2025-2027). He is the author of Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award and finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He is the co-editor, with Simmons Buntin and Elizabeth Dodd, of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy and, with Elizabeth Bradfield and CMarie Fuhrman, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. His awards include the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, the Foreword Reviews Indies Book of the Year in Nature Writing, and the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee. Derek lives on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington and is the poetry editor of Terrain.org.
