Christmas Eve at the Zoo

 

Christmas Eve at the Zoo

Elephants, your favorites, are knocking
at the door to the elephant house. How does
an elephant knock? Hard. With trunk.

It’s cold out here.
I squeeze your little hand.
A baby wallaby studies us from mother’s pouch.
Wrapped in my coat against my legs,
you study back.

Giraffes make passes at an open door
but their bodies are a collection
of angles and the door is quite specific.
I call to them, “Watch your head!”
You lift your eyes upward, then sideways and say
“How can they watch their own heads?”

In the monkey house one gorilla
stares blankly at a television, Gilligan’s Island
while another turns his back and regurgitates
which is how I would feel, too.

I wonder, “Do they want to hang stockings?”
You say, “Not all animals celebrate Christmas.”
Then you add: “Just like people.”

Already you understand:
    we go to the zoo
    to see ourselves.

......

First published in Storyteller Poetry Review. Thank you editor Sharon Waller Knutson.
Photo by Joseph C Boone

Frozen Shark

 

Frozen Shark

A busload of first-graders I bring
to the Academy of Science Museum
where (weird best part) we watch
workers with forklift and cables
hoist a frozen great white shark
into a glass-walled freezer but
(weird worst part) the forklift coughs.
A cable creaks.

A monster swings toward us
so in reflex I reach up my hands
against iceberg shark snout
jerking my backbone (a crunch)
enough for forklift to adjust
while the thought flashes
What if my fingers weld to this beast?
They don’t
but my lumbar joints
scream in pain. You’d do the same.

Lunch in the academy courtyard
by a fountain full of tossed coins.
On a bench I lie supine, resting spine
while poor kids, my class reach in water
up to armpits plucking treasure, soaking
pockets. Nell a speedy girl gathers the most.
A boy, not poor not my class hangs back,
watching, then asks speedy girl Nell
“Can I have some of your quarters?”
Oh labor. Oh life.

Nell shares, then sits by me.
“Why’d you give?” I ask.
She shrugs, offers me a coin.

At day’s end I tell you this.
You ask “How can I help?” as you
apply heat, soft fingers to my back.
Here love, let us share
one damp penny.

…..

First published in Speckled Trout. Thank you editors Kevin McDaniel, Nancy Gillingham