by Alejandro Escudé
A lizard, small, on my walk along
the largest airport in the country,
dead, curled, fetus-like, so swift
they are as they shoot back toward
the ivy mounds. At times I imagine
how many trash bins would the
lizards fill if they were all collected
from the overgrowth—so I take
with my iPhone a photo of him,
Cretaceous little being, extinct,
and think about the latest warning
issued to all Apple users, a hack
where they could take control,
absolute control, the newscaster
asserts, of your phone. I yearn
for a return to those lizard days
when I couldn’t carry around
a sea of digital pirates, both legal
and illegal, a neon mind-maze,
yet enough data to assume society’s
panoptic perch. I choose to keep
from running another space race
with my phone, contemplate
the deadness of a dead lizard
on the sidewalk as monolithic
shadows of planes, like the foot-
prints of a dinosaur accelerated
in time, mesh onward to the west.
Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.