Will You Please Stop Feeding the Pterodactyls, Please?
after Raymond Carver

Last week we said goodbye to my ex-wife Sherry
who was quarantining with my wife Gloria and me
before helping our daughter Cait with her new baby,

and this morning I read about pterodactyls and zoos.
Impressive CGI kids fall for—how the two, dinosaurs
and zoos, have culminated in cautionary comic-signage
telling the people: Please Don’t Feed the Pterodactyls.

Maybe you could call us Dinosaurs, the three of us,
for outlasting the foulest parts of a forty-year history,
so much finally swept away as if by an unseen hand.

You meet some great people committing adultery—
so I recall under rec room lighting, handing over the
Netflix remote with swapped-out batteries, conceding
control over what I needed to learn to share control of.

I was working at being more than an alpha with hair
at sixty-six and a rattling cough that had him worried.
Sure, I imagined coronavirus. Those invisible, spiked

virus-shells snatching control of the body in a series
of acts much like predation. I don’t know anyone who
would spend three months sheltering in place with a
wife and ex-wife—both of whom, over the years,

had skilled themselves at ganging up against him.
Thankfully, I never once felt I was being fed upon
as I managed my part of the cooking and cleaning.

Once or twice, I may’ve heard overhead-wingbeats.
Ectoplasmic pterosaurs who had long since died out:
specters piloting above all that mercy and love as we
did whatever was asked of us in the Monkey House.

A finalist for the Miller Williams prize, Roy Bentley has published ten books of poetry. His work has appeared in magazines, including Shenandoah, North American Review, Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, december and Prairie Schooner among others. His latest collection, Beautiful Plenty, is available from Main Street Rag.