Million–Year Elegies: Tyrannosaurus
I am six. I am looking at your teeth.
I am calculating the volume
of your excavator jaw.
They have stripped you, chipped the stone
from your naked frame, unsheathed you
from feathers or scales. Leaving this skull
with holes I could put my hand through.
Unshielded from the wind and the din
of this crane–necked crowded room.
I am thinking of being inside you.
Plucked from the ground with serrated tongs
and swallowed. I am not thinking of pain.
Pressure, yes. The loss of breath,
the darkness and heat of you.
I would die of fear. But your jaws
are round and strong and I am small
and I want to crawl inside.
I will be old and never realize
why I crave an armor made of razor bones.
Why I am hungry for men with teeth.
Only a tyrant, the fiercest of monsters,
could ever contain me.
(Editors’ Note: “Million–Elegies: Tyrannosaurus” is read by Erika Ensign in the Uncanny Magazine Podcast Episode 12B.)
© 2016 by Ada Hoffmann
Ada Hoffmann’s debut novel, The Outside, was released by Angry Robot Books in June 2019. She is also the author of the collection Monsters in My Mind and of dozens of speculative short stories and poems, as well as the Autistic Book Party #ownvoices review series. Her work has been long-listed for the BSFA Award for Shorter Fiction, the Rhysling Award, and the D Franklin Defying Doomsday Award.
Ada is a computer scientist at a university in southern Ontario, Canada, where she teaches computers to be creative and undergraduates to think computationally about the human mind. She has also worked professionally as a church soprano, free food distributor, and token autistic person. Ada is bisexual, genderfluid, polyamorous, and mentally ill. She lives with her primary partner Dave, her black cat Ninja, and various other animals and people.
You can find Ada online at http://ada-hoffmann.com/, on Twitter at @xasymptote, or support her work on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/ada_hoffmann.
