Self-Portrait of What’s Attainable 

Associate Editor Andy Sia: When I encountered Aaliyah Anderson’s poem after the last passenger pigeon, Martha, in the slush pile, I was immediately intrigued, given Martha’s ties to Cincinnati—Martha died at the Cincinnati Zoo after most of her life there. More broadly, I’m drawn to Anderson’s rendering of death as a continuation that is not wholly translatable, to be sure, and yet also unforgettable. In the poem, communing with the dead, our dead, involves a scrambling of relations and ways of knowing, such that turquoise unthreads, lint rolls, and the world appears stranger, more true.

Listen to Anderson read the poem:

Self-Portrait of What’s Attainable 

after the last passenger pigeon

There, we aren’t arguing. 
Jaundice. Nude. Tiles  
line themselves up.  

Not synced, you  
babble but spit 
regrets to catch 

up. Words such as 
when just after now.  
Holes—everywhere.  

Widening digits in  
your rouge gloves. 
Turquoise unthreading 

itself. Silver & dead, 
tales continue flying. I  
think black plaster 

upholds collagen. Martha 
organizes last death.  
Better left untranslated.  

Depart the foreign as  
unreachable, unforgettable like  
our knitted socks, those 

names engraved where  
we don’t discern. It’s  
easy—kick your shank, 

lift the painter’s tape. 
She’s flayed, stuffed, but  
our lint rolls.