Tag: Animals

The Circus Lion’s Lament

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

Featured Art: Circus Clown and Dancer by Marc Chagall

So what happened? I used to be a lion, crashing
the herd and yanking down stampeding

zebras on the hoof. Days spent pissing hot gold

across the Serengeti! The ground gone tawny
with my scat! Those long afternoons

of fly-blown torpor, those gristly jawfuls of prey

and those after-fuck yawns. At night, snoozing
into my paws, I’d twitch and thump

the muscular scourge of my dreaming tail . . .

But Emily the Elephant jerks my chain, suggests
my ferocious howls lack plausibility

or conviction. O how I howl! I can rend the air

with lost prerogatives! Demolish the audience
with has-been imperium! I worry

and tooth the Ringmaster’s splintery stool. Dolts

applaud. Clowns in a jalopy lampoon
terror, hitched to their posse of sidekick knuckle-

draggers waddling away in diapers and tuxedos . . .

Come night, I’ll sniff the corners for what’s left
of my petrified stink, the proof

I somehow still exist. Breakfast’s tossed in at six.

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Animals

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Brock Guthrie

Featured Art: Leg in Hammock by Edward Weston

One is what one looks at—well, at least partially. —Joseph Brodsky

All morning in my hammock burning
a tight one, poised with pencil and notebook
and seven-week beard, I look to the pines
outside my cabin, seeking inspiration
from the birds and the squirrels
whose singing and foraging, whose
exclamations, no, arguments, reflect
my inner my inner my inner . . .
and every so often my cousin Ricky returns
from hunting rabbits on my four-wheeler
to tell me he’s thought of a new way
to beat off: Anywhere around here to buy
watermelons? Even his camo flannel
can’t conceal that Superdome belly
and I hate to think how long
since anyone’s seen his diminutive dangle
so I tell him in all seriousness, my sympathy
sincere, You might be on to something,
but after he tokes and rides away
I get inspired, realize I should’ve said
Go drive around these country roads, man,
look for signs! and even Ricky would’ve
nodded with a look of feigned profundity
like he’s posing for an author photo
but I let that moment go

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Pelicans

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Robert Cording

Featured Image: “Australian Pelican” by Elizabeth Gould

Last evening, another sunset party:
drinks, laughs, ironies, hidden desires.
All of us tanned and glowing, we exchanged
jokes and gossip, fresh and stale, self-conscious
that something larger was missing
when we turned to best watches, shoes, cigars.

So much time is lost trying to agitate
the envies of others and monitor one’s own—
the thought that crossed my mind as I watched
six pelicans rise and fall with the water’s flux.
The winds had quieted, and just before the sun plunged
below the sea, the pelicans rose in a wind-hung line

and flew off, silent as a council of gods
in the pinkish sky. Palm trees scratched
their cuneiform shadows on the sand.
I wanted to say something about the pelicans,
who I knew, for no known reason, choose to live
their lives as near total mutes, as if they’d decided

simply to be done with the fecklessness of speaking,
but I kept quiet, the light draining from the sky,
the others going inside. I felt like a child in hiding,
alone on the deck, made fearful and alive
by the darkened Gulf, the stretch of beach
now entirely empty, the palm trees,

the sliver of moon rising directly opposite
of where the sun had set. If I had been called
to come in, I would have kept silent.

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Tauromaquia

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Deborah Casillas

Featured Image: “Standing Bull” by Jean Bernard

The days dragged on, steady ticking of the clock.
My mother’s cancer; surgery, injections, drugs.
Long afternoons I sat in my grandfather’s library
looking at books. Shelves of books about bullfighting—
la lidia, combat; la corrida, the running of the bulls.
Books on Manolete, Belmonte, Joselito,
his copies of The Brave Bulls, Blood and Sand,
Death in the Afternoon. Books aficionados collect,
those fanatic followers of the taurine subculture.
I stacked volumes beside me, looked at pictures
of the black bulls, studied their deadly horns,
the ritual sacrifice. Here were portraits of the famous
matadors, their lives venerated like the lives of saints.

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When It’s That Time for Piranhas

.Reading time 2 minutes.

by Michael Derrick Hudson

Featured image: Utagawa Hiroshige. Swallow and Wisteria, mid-1840s. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Everything has already blossomed: my neighbor’s wisteria
has gone hog-wild across the ragged frontier of
our mutual fence, the soft green tendrils
of it violating international borders

and breaking treaties. Achtung! So let me tell you about

my neighbor’s wife: she’s delicious! And every morning
I hear all the birds in Fort Wayne, Indiana, go

Yippee-yee! Yippee-yee! Which is how spring jibber-jabbers
while her husband blows the leafy detritus

off their depilated lawn. Something’s missing. I want to be
indigenous with her, something somehow prehistoric—

I want her in Brazil. I want a quiver full of spindly arrows
to fetch our breakfast’s blue-tailed skink or

supper’s three-toed sloth. I want ritual scarification, coherent
rites of passage. I want grandpa’s thighbone
whittled down to a splinter

and dangling around my neck.
I want to help her stitch banana leaves, scorch
grubs against a rock. I want her to smile at me like a jaguar,

each incisor filed to a point. I want poisonous frogs, seashell
currency, enemies who make sense, a copper
plug through my lip. I want

a shameless squat. I want mumbo-jumbo witches to shun and
screeching ghosts to appease. I want her to take me

down to the river where we’ll knot and
inch our way across. I want her to trust me to be the lookout

for piranhas. I want to know when it’s that time for piranhas.

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A Mile In

.Reading time 4 minutes.

By Julie Hanson

Selected as winner of the 2011 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest by Nancy Eimers

Feature image: Claude Lorrain. View of Delphi with a Procession, 1673. The Art Institute of Chicago.

The snow had been with us for awhile
and was dingy and not well lit.
But the sun promised to come out.
The light fog lifting
against the skinny tree trunks
and the grounded limbs they’d lost
and the thick, half-detached vines
would lift off,
dissolved, by the end of our walk.
We’d taken the footbridge
across the creek and followed the bend
away from traffic and toward the west ridge.
We’d gone a mile in,
to where usually I begin to listen to
our progress in the twigs and gravel of the path,
and past this, and past my own
periodic reminders to the dog
to the short, uncomplicated songs
of winter birds. And there,
near the spill of rocks in the creek
where the fog was still passing through branches
and a little farther and to the right
where a stretch of tall grasses
received a wide gift
of sunlight and several cows,
the air that stood still
between the trees and shimmered
over the grasses filled with sound—
a big voice moving through
a hundred thousand habitats—
and it said, “Attention in this area.
The following is a regular monthly
test of the Outdoor Warning System . . .”
It spoke from the west first,
sounding closer than it could be.
And it spoke from the southeast next.
“This is a test,” it said, “only a . . .
“This is a test . . . ” it began again
from somewhere else.
The dog returned to me, cowering.
I’d wondered before
without much curiosity,
where were those speakers housed,
were they towered, did they revolve?
Ordinarily heard in the yard
while I stood pinning laundry to the line,
the broadcast soon plunged and sank
into the noise of passing cars
and blown and rolling garbage cans
and faded like the little ringing
that emanates from construction sites.
But here, it seemed full minutes long
before my breath was back again in my chest,
and my dog’s breath,
steady and rough, was back in hers,
when the voice had left the air
between the trees, as had the fog.
At last a bird sounded from a twig.
At last a squirrel came down
and sent the dog. And then,
made up of other sounds
I could not have singled out,
a normalcy rolled in.
Infinitesimal bits is all it was
—quick beaks breaking up the peat,
the slow collision of a leaf landing, scooting
half an inch along a big flat rock,
a splat of excrement in white,
a flinch, a flap, a flick. But as it came it felt
to be a counter-vigilance. Or like
the sound of consciousness. The is.

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Fly

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Joyce Peseroff

Featured art: Street Musicians by Eugène Atget

A small fly hung around my kitchen mid-October.
It didn’t buzz. Outside wet shape-shifted, drop to
flake: knock-knock of rain, a who’s there of snow.
The fly tiptoed on the meat-cutting board where I aimed
to smash it like a head of garlic. It bounced wall to wall to
wall, baby trapped in the balloon that was a hoax.
Was it my mother’s perturbed spirit warning me that blood
stains? Of course not. Last of its kind, Robinson Crusoe landing
on a kitchen island, the fly needed to be warm.

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A Giant Bird

.Reading time 5 minutes.

By Kevin Prufer

Its great heart pounded like the distant sea
wounding itself against the cliffs.

+

We lived in its shade.

Sometimes, my daughter ran her fingers along that part of the breast
that swagged low over our camp.

It’s beautiful, she said, smoothing a feather’s twig-like barbs,
gazing past our mountain toward the burning cities.

+

What kind of bird is it?
                Some feathers were tawny, others tinged a perfect white.
Is it a sparrow?
                It may be a sparrow.
Is it an owl?
                I can’t see its face.
An eagle? I think it’s an eagle.
                                We often played this game.

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Feeling Sorry for Myself While Standing Before the Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum in London

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

Oh yes my friend, I’ve been there; the insects battering at
the armored lids of your yellowish eyes

the moment you pecked your way out of that rotten shell
and dug out from your sandpit nets . . .

And I’ve experienced the thud thud thud of your days,
the indigestible monotony

of everything’s spiny orangy-green husk. How the sun
gets daily whiter and hotter and just

a little bit closer. The week spent gobbling down your

own weight’s worth of whatever. One stumpy
footprint after another, tracking the trackless, squelching

across last night’s marsh into a volcano-spattered today
hip-deep in ash and yawning

a muzzleful of sulfur. Swishing through stiff fronds,

we drag an unbearable load of tombstones on our back
and a fat lugubrious tail, shit-smutched and

spiked. The flattening of the razor grass. The forgotten
clutch of eggs. Our shrill yaps

and groans. That tiny gray walnut
for a brain and the fat black tongue tough as a bootsole . . .

They’ve explained us away a dozen times: some passing
meteorite or anther, the rat-like mammals

eating our pitiful young, all kinds
of new weather. Issueless, but far too stupid to be forlorn,

we trundle along the pink quartz shore
to sip at the lukewarm edge of yet another evaporating sea.

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Disintegration of Purpose at Cocoa Beach, Florida (Part 1)

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

A pelican divebombs the same shimmery-shammery silver stripe
of the horizon. The pale yellow and presumably

bloodless crabs scuttle to their holes, terrified by my shadow

all over again. Again! They’ll never figure it out,
but of course every moment for them is nothing but the fretful

expectation of imminent death. They’re expendable. Fecund.

Edible. Fuck ’em. So where’s my hero? My old conquistador
my Castilian grandee terrible with purpose . . .

Señor! Over here, por favor! But what if he did come, feverish

and bedraggled, this Spaniard wading hip-deep through the surf
cumbered by his mildewed ruffles

and waterlogged boots, in silver salt-pitted
spurs and a rust-bucket helmet? He’d spout nonsense, bragging

about the usual claptrap: solid gold wigwams, diamonds bigger
than pumpkins and an obsidian-eyed princess

festooned with raccoon tails. There’d be those outrageous lies,

poison darts tinking off his armor while tramping the Everglades
and living these five hundred years fetched

off death’s front stoop by a few quavering, toothless sips from

the Fountain of Youth. With the point of his cutlass he’d scratch
the beach with treasure maps and schemes, telling tales

of the cannon-shattered fo’c’sle and those desolate, bone-littered
passageways. I’d put up with it for as long

as I could. ¡Hola! History stops here, Señor! Everything does!

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The Businessman Cleans a Mermaid for His Supper

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

Yeah I snagged her, I snagged her good and then I shucked her
out of her shimmy, killed off that last twitch

of hers in the sink. And those labials, all of her wet slobbery

labials I reduced to a dried-out oxygen-starved O. I flensed
her down to the bone and chopped

away her emerald green flukes. I got wet to the elbows in her
and scraped at her dime-sized translucent scales

until they spangled the tops of my greasy boots
and clogged the drains. But her filets were worth it, redolent

of ambergris with a tincture of seaweed. In her eyes I found

tiny discs of abalone, the secret of their weird yellowish glint
like a cat’s in poor light. And then I brought her

to a resinous sizzle. But what a fight! Such fabulous breaches

How she resisted my hooks and gaffs, the vast tangle and bulge
of my nets. She couldn’t believe the multitude

of knots I’d mastered or these chains and rudders and screws or
my hand-over fist desires and

the way I whistled at my work. Or my inevitable appetite . . .

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Valuable Lessons Learned on Delaware Bay After the Horseshoe Crabs Came Ashore to Spawn

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

They look like the Devil’s codpiece.
They look like the Shield of Achilles.
They look like George Washington’s last boot heel.

Oh sure, noggins get cracked, the meat tweezed out

in a glut of shrieking seagulls. Always sun-vexed
throughout their frantic scrabblings

they suffer the dried-out gill, the blotted eye,
the heartbreakingly feeble clench

of an expiring mouthpart. But still they deposit
what they can of their sorry clutches,

their dabs and globs of purpose, spotting the world
with their gluey yeses. Satiated,

doomed, happily they nibble
at their own nutritious backwash, feel around with

their feelies. Tipped-over. Busted. They look like
The Battle of Berlin. They look like the Last Days
of Brontosaurus. But they persist.

You know, they persist.

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Listen

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Eric Schwerer

Featured Image: Sunset, Oxford by George Elbert Burr 1899

Here every evening a woman
strides into her backyard calling
her rabbit which raises an ear when she sings:
Peppermint’s eyes’re red, His fur’s so white, Oh
where’s Peppermint gone tonight? When she sees him
she relaxes and lingers in twilight
as fireflies make brief green slashes
and the blacktop ticks with the heat
it’s digested all day. Then in her grass
while the light collapses I watch her daydream
a portion of the dusk away. I mean
I imagine she daydreams as through my screen
I watch her stride about shoeless, her rabbit
nibbling the lawn going gray. In a clean blouse,
fresh from a shower, with night coming on,
she might think of marriage. The lace
curtains in the windows of her house
are drawn. In my own still air and losing light
I stare at her, her curtains, her rabbit’s white hair.
Downstairs at the sink in my darkening kitchen
a glass of iced water is crying a ring—
Has he hopped the gate?
Left me again? Peppermint please—
She continues to sing, though it’s not
wandered and would not ever leave.

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Sparrow

.Reading time 1 minute.

By George Bilgere

On the bricks of the patio
A sparrow is struggling with a used tampon
It half-flew, half-dragged here
From a dumpster across the street.

The tampon resembles a wounded rat.
Those of us enjoying our coffee
And New York Times in the spring morning
Pretend to ignore it.

But all the suns in all the galaxies,
And all the planets around our own paltry star,
Are turning on the same invisible pulleys
That drive the sparrow
To build a cozy little crib
In the eaves under somebody’s gutters,

And to find, sooner the better,
Another sparrow who hears
The same music of the spheres.

You can’t argue with that.

And though some of us on the patio might believe
That what the sparrow is wrestling with
Is the blight man was born for,
The curse Adam fell for,

For the bird
It’s an engineering problem: the tampon’s
Too stubbornly stitched together
For a tiny beak to tear apart,

And too heavy
With human blood to carry off
Into the blue air of the future.

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At the Dinner Party

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Stephen Dunn

Featured Art: A Family Meal by Evert Pieters

As usual, we were trying to please each other,

so Ryan told a story about a water buffalo,

a lion, and a crocodile, which reminded

Julie about a coyote and a groundhog, and

I could not help but offer my favorite of

this kind—involving the tarantula

and its natural enemy the digger wasp. The

problem was that each story was true,

therefore that much more difficult to tell,

and each had in it an element of the fabulous,

and therefore the promise of a moral.

Linda, the contrarian, asked us if we had heard

the one about the priest and the rabbi,

but was booed, and kept quiet for a while.

In each story an animal was in danger, one

always slightly more sympathetic

than another. The water buffalo rescued

her injured calf from first the crocodile

then the lion, the coyote got bored

with the groundhog and returned to the woods,

and the tarantula just stood there, frozen,  while

the digger wasp dug its grave.

Ryan and Julie selected their details well,

paced and arranged them, as I hope I did,

and it wasn’t that our intent was to avoid

a moral, but that there was none to be had,

this being nature we were talking about

with its choiceless whims and atrocities.

Linda, of course, said she forgave none of it.

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Little Bird

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Lawrence Raab

Featured Art: Seascape by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

One cloud was following another
across a blue and passionless sky.
It was the middle of summer, far enough
from December for a man to feel indifferent
to the memories of cold, not yet close
enough to autumn to be caught up
in all its folderol about death.
Neither cloud looked like a whale
or a weasel, or any kind of fanciful beast.
All morning I’d felt my life dragging me down.
The view from my window refused to lift my heart.
The sight of a blank piece of paper
filled me with sadness. I wanted to set
my life down in a comfortable chair, tell it
to take a long nap, and walk away as if
I were somebody else, somebody without a house
or a family or a job, but somebody who might
soon feel with a pang precisely the absence
of everything I had. A cool breeze lifted
the curtains in the room where I was sitting.
A bird was singing. Had it been singing for long?
Far off there were mountains, but I didn’t
wish to go there. Nor did I yearn
to be standing by a lake, or walking
beside the tumult of the sea.
The little bird kept repeating itself.
I filled a glass with water and watched it tremble.

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The Last One

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

By Bruce Weigl

Featured Art: Two Plant Specimens by William Henry Fox Talbot

The anonymous brown song bird
        is annoying in her insistence
             on repeating the same three syllables
in exactly the same way, endlessly.

        She must know something
             about inevitability,
                       to sing so long,
        no one else in sight.

        The persistence of nature;
         the blind and infinite dedication to a thing
                       in the face of emptiness and silence
        that won’t let you believe that you are the last.

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Chicken

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Stephen Cramer

Featured Image: For Sunday’s Dinner by William Michael Barnett

At the festival when we were celebrating
harvest with pumpkin tarts & cider,
an older farmer asked what I was into
& maybe my answer was muffled a bit
from the cider’s tang because he started
talking passionately not about his favorite poet
or the use of weather in haiku
but about his chickens: White Leghorns,
Silkie Bantams, Rhode Island Reds,
Plymouth Rocks, how, in Corporate Agriculture
the birds are bred so big that their legs
cripple beneath them & isn’t that a shame.
I tried to break in, to tell him he misheard.
But he shook his head & held up his finger.
That’s not the case with his birds.
When his hens are laying he puts oyster shells
in their grit to give them extra calcium
for their own shells. His birds are free range—
not debeaked & stuffed two dozen
to a pen. No, his birds can go anywheres they want
from the barn to the bog & even in the house.
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