Last Bison Gone.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

LAST BISON GONE

   Ours is the curse of the blighted touch
   that wilts every green shoot and flower
   we mean to admire, keep, re-create

   or improve. New Zealand's huia bird,
   prized for her scimitar beak
   and pleated Victorian petticoat tail,

   was hunted extinct except for this
   diving-belled brooch and sad hatband,
   fast falling to dust

   in the Smithsonian. We love what we love
   in the scientific way, efficient, empiric,
   vicious, too much

   and always we touch it, our breath
   blooming algae on the walls of Lascaux,
   shimmering in acid-etch green.

[from God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World (Tebot Bach 2010), first published in West Marin Review.]

ARTWORK BY LORNA STEVENS

Rebecca Faust's books are All That Gorgeous, Pitiless Song (Many Mountains Moving, 2010) and Mom's Canoe and Dark Card, awarded the 2007 and 2008 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prizes. Recent poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, the Hudson Review, North American Review, and Poetry Daily.

Lama Stevens received her MFA in sculpture from Columbia University. She exhibits widely in galleries and public spaces. Her work has received mention in the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Marin Independent Journal, and Artweek, and has been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum and the NewYork Public Library.