people and bears once acorned together. we salmoned, savannahed, we walked here. we do this again with each remembering. see: as I write, tiny ticks of nail and claw slough pleistocene snow. there is a crossing
of foot and paw. we remember it is not so lonely to wear sapiens as a tail. we grow humps as we grizzle, our noses wetter too. let us grandmother, and replenish valley oak washes with bears. it will remind us
how we are human. a rich journalist from san francisco sought california’s last bear: los angelenos, we nursed him from our red chaparral. we circused him, and forgot how we settlers of hard ecologies
chose to be lonely. perhaps we can now bear our reparation with berries on our teeth and with fur in our ears. we can bear this by inviting them home. I do not wish to be singular on this planet by nature
of my thumbs. I drive my mother to the airport and she admits how she thinks to me throughout each day, showing me all she sees as if I am with her. I do this too. we live on through our kin. a bear has skin
under their fur, a human has fur under their skin. I am trying to understand what it means to be from them and what it will mean to be from me. I want to feel at home here, I am afraid that I am
flint to a tender prairie, causing the sagebrush to spark by only my bootlaces.
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Lara Volski is interested in the reciprocal influence of people and animals on each other. As a poet and wildlife ecologist, she seeks to understand how people’s beliefs and values determine the composition of ecosystems and how ecosystems in turn make us who we are. Lara is a PhD student in the People and Wildlife Lab at the University of Washington, where she studies the management of large and controversial carnivores in the western United States.
