we call it The Birds and The Bees
and yet this never translates
to two gay penguins raising their young
or the gender mindfuck that is anthophila
we cannot measure desire
(gold dust day geckos and European bitterlings
have declined to take Kinsey scale tests)
and we do not know their languages well
enough to hear the cadences of self-
identification, but we can measure
one thing: homosexual behavior
i.e. fucking courtship affection
traveling pairing off or parenting
we have golden monkeys and rattlesnakes, jewel
cichlids and killer whales and false killer
whales, and maybe this is where the confusion
comes from—this, and tasmanian devils: cartoonishly
imagined hell-sent queer chaos
we have migratory locusts, a nomadic
plague left wandering; they say we are the plague,
but we know what true plagues look like: albatrosses
draped like metaphors, we have mourning
geckos reproducing by parthenogenesis, a species nearly
all female, where even the males are sterile,
and all-female whiptail lizards who simulate fucking
our court has a king penguin, queen
butterfly, nobility in the form
of espejitos with glass
wings perfectly translucent,
nearly invisible, and vampire
bats not uncommon—
vampires always return to queer
in some way or another
while the bicolored antbird is, disappointingly,
not pink, purple, and blue, we do have
so many of the intelligent
species like elephants and dolphins, but
in our next queer lifetime, many of us would love
to come back as birds of paradise,
birds of whatever paradise we could find
Audrey T. Carroll is the author of the What Blooms in the Dark (ELJ Editions, 2024) and Parts of Speech: A Disabled Dictionary (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her writing has appeared in Lost Balloon, CRAFT, JMWW, Bending Genres, and others. She is a bi/queer/genderqueer and disabled/chronically ill writer. She serves as a Diversity & Inclusion Editor for the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and as a Fiction Editor for Chaotic Merge Magazine. She can be found at http://AudreyTCarrollWrites.weebly.com and @AudreyTCarroll on Twitter/Instagram.