Miniature Bears

Given the loneliness and unreliability of dreams,
I stay awake for days until I squint just right and glimpse
a future in which miniature bears are bought and sold.
They’re expensive, or don’t get along, for in each house that has one
they are their only kind, shaped and sized as pears, and pairless.
They’re small, but hold their own with other family pets.
Their people love them, they love back. They’re grown in labs.
They don’t need surgery to stop their procreation.
They growl when they’re born, they growl when they die.
While they’re alive they’re often photographed pursuing rolling fruit.
They’re easy to feed. They deposit feces silently,
smellessly, in adorable spheroids, regrettably
killing a few dozen children each year that ingest them.
I can’t be sure, but they seem to come as a shock
to a future world that thought it knew everything,
knew how many animals it had extincted,
but not the ones that it could grow by accident.
I pinch myself to validate the vision,
but only feel the piercing of the tiniest of claws
in the corners of my eyes, nascent, godless, sharp.

***

Thomas Mixon has poetry and fiction in At Length, On Spec, The Broadkill Review, and elsewhere.