European fishermen kept kettles burning on Funk Island, one of the largest great auk nesting sites, for nearly three hundred years, starting around 1534. Auks were thrown alive into the boiling water.
Molloy carried, for runny nose,
a book of poems: Whitman.
Those verses being irrelevant
to sailors, one man tore Behold!
This is the compost of billions
of premature corpses, from page
209. He wiped the tears
the wind ripped from his eyes.
Ten huddled days in a hut
of pink granite. Puffins watched
from a crumble of pens.
The crew rested on turf specked
with spoonwort like little mice
teeth. One rolled a cigarette, as
I understand it, using a page
that declared, That when I recline
on the grass I do not catch
any disease! and ended, Now
I am terrified at the Earth!
One dug his fists into the soil,
still felt eggshell a foot
deep. It grows such sweet things
out of such corruptions, said
the sheet in which they folded
one of three auk mummies.
At last, they shipped off for Saint John,
sold five tons of compost
at auction, nineteen dollars each.
The rest shipped to Boston,
where a child, in her garden, found
a feather beneath a plum tree.
—
Erin L. McCoy’s poetry collection, Wrecks, is forthcoming from Noemi Press. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Conjunctions, and other publications. Her work has been selected for the Best New Poets anthology twice, and she was a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Miller Audio Prize. Her website is erinlmccoy.com.
