Jake the Alligator Man

Jake the Alligator Man

It might be a distant ancestor of man,
a ‘missing link’ that jumped off
the evolutionary ladder
—Weekly World News

Man’s head, gator’s body fished from a Florida swamp,
Sphinx-pose mummy sludging everglade roots.
His folks shed toe webs, stretched limbs, rose
to build The Tower of Babel. Jake couldn’t join—
eggs steaming, pond breath slow, common puddle. 

Hair splotches blow-dried like Orlando wetlands,
Jake’s tossed in a trailer, shipped across the country,
oil barrels thumping his scute-shield. Gull squawk—
mouth of the Columbia, same spot Lewis and Clark
tagged a shore pine, hawked Sacagawea’s blue-beaded 

belt for otter robes, pelt sheen warming sopped backs.
Jefferson’s boys and the boat-launching bird woman;
curiosity thrusts us to the beach and back, wrecking
nests, hatching remnants. A French fur trapper gets
horny and grabs a new wife, trails our basal ganglia 

across the Continental Divide. They sketch condors,
eat dogs, lounge Long Beach, set up shop: Marsh’s
Free Museum, home to the “World’s Largest
Frying Pan”— once seared a 300-pound clam fritter,
sea brine gleeking as loggers licked tang-chapped lips.

Washed in white terrarium sand, Jake’s new roost
stands by yak eyes and a cycloptic lamb, two-headed calf,
the Russian boar, shrunken head of a nameless man.
Archive of dumb preserves, Mr. Marsh’s freaky finds

with Jake smack in the middle, fishbowled just north
of the salmon run. Eyeless divots, ghost slits. Teeth
remain, scummed prodigies. Ribs protrude, old starvation.
Carnivore rage petrified to a pit stop wonder.

Ryan Topper is an associate professor of English at Western Oregon University. He is the author of Animist Poetics: Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature, published by the State University of New York Press in 2025.