For years I ate the ecological soup,
slurped models and proxies
and chewed on assumptions that ballooned
larger than the bluest whale’s heart.
I wanted to bring back all the bears
to watch them run wild down Bloor
and if a grizzly cracked open a cocky hiker’s skull
I’d call it fair and square. I was ready
to give up megalopolises and
rows upon rows of gas stations and nightclubs
for a fighting chance at rewilding
those chihuahuas in small purses so that
we’d have more eastern timber wolves
at King and Spadina. One summer
I ate so much ecological soup that
my limbs each turned into various ingredients.
I was ladled into quartz beakers and swallowed
without care. That day in the scientists’ bellies
was the day I decided I didn’t want
to invent anything that could live
in a world without the American bullfrog.
I decided I would give up
all the soup ingredients
in exchange for more
than one cultivar of banana or rain
that won’t melt my face off
or trees so massive they’ll require my lungs
to swell up into blimps.
There are only twenty-five blimps left in the whole entire world
and exactly zero Yangtze river dolphins.
Is there such a thing as an excess of adaptation?
Please say no. There is still so much
I want.
Megan Horsthuis is a Canadian ecologist and MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her recent poetry is anthologized by The Dark Mountain Project. They live on stolen xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ land, where they work as an editor for PRISM International.