Two Poems
Mark Blaeuer
The Evolutionary Pageant
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A bevy of high-heeled Neanderthals
lope down their catwalk off the neon stage.
Each massive brow ridge glistens in the night
so made for glamour. TV critics, rapt,
effuse about the matted furs draped off
those hairy shoulders. Camera flashes dot
the audience, bright jewels in blackened hush,
and then the band strikes up a suitably
egregious bit of Hollywood soundtrack
to signal our contestants that it’s time
for Q and A. The sleazy emcee asks
what he asks always, and the beauties grunt
their way to finalism. Now a pause
to whet the appetite for judgment, and—
once more, the crowning tears amid the stench
of bear grease and a bloody rabbit leg.
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Mark’s notes: ​​“This blank-verse piece came out in The Orchards, 2016. The poem’s title is a phrase used for more than a century to dramatize the amazing diversity of species that once flourished on our planet. Of course, I think it’d be just as much fun to imagine all these extinct organisms dancing down the streets of New Orleans in a jazz funeral, but the pageant image is pretty entrenched in science textbooks. Hence, I tried to enliven the existing metaphor—at the expense of the poor Neanderthals, who, it now appears, were brainier than previously assumed.“
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In the Late Formative
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Sierra Madre foothills ringed the site
we excavated on semester break:
an ancient city, Kaminaljuyú,
basaltic stelae with their history
of dynasties, of warriors, of blood.
No word—or more precisely, not a glyph—
of Mayan peasants doing mundane work.
On Saturday, a respite for the crew,
we climbed a mountain (surely first to dare),
adventurers in heat, humidity,
and thirst-for-stimulus. Perspiring
heavily, we attained our crest to see
this wiry old woman seated there.
She’d spied us from below and scurried up
the far slope, tumpline to her cooler—Cokes,
fifteen quetzales each, a bargain price.
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Mark’s notes: “Blank verse again! Better Than Starbucks published this one in 2020. During the 1970s I studied anthropology at Penn State, and a professor of Meso-American archaeology once included this story in a lecture. I don’t remember him providing any details about where and how it happened, so my ’reconstruction’ places the events in Guatemala.”
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Mark Blaeuer lives just south of Lofton, Arkansas. He was a ranger for many years at nearby Hot Springs National Park, and his M.A. is in Anthropology. His poems (and a few translations from Spanish) have appeared in 100+ magazines, such as Better Than Starbucks, Bindweed, The Borough, Ezra, Grand Little Things, The HyperTexts, Lighten Up Online, The Orchards, Passionfruit Review, Pulsebeat, Susurrus, Ultramarine Literary Review, and Wales Haiku Journal. His collections are Fragments of a Nocturne (Kelsay Books, 2014) and Surfacing Below (SurVision Books, 2025). He’s also written a couple of history books: Didn’t All the Indians Come Here? (Eastern National, 2007 [out of print]) and Baseball in Hot Springs (Arcadia Publishing, 2016).
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