POETRY

When the nuns arrive at the zoo

By Elizabeth C. Garcia     VOLUME 57 No. 2

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we find we have longed for the brown flock of them,
their beads clicking through the zoo paths
while our children chirp and swarm

the big bronze nest, demand the breast,
and we ponder how useful a tail could be. Surely they
are attuned to new manifestations for love,

lessons on how to live with need?
I imagine the abbess pointing out
a precedent: The Komodo, leathery virgin,

can spawn her own offspring when finding herself
alone. Mimic the patient cardinalfish, who broods
in her mouth whatever is not yet ready to swim.

Or Consider the tortoise: let not surety
harden you like a carapace, but turn your belly
skyward to the hawk. Instead:

the giraffes refuse the lettuce.
One kneels like a penitent in the dirt,
the other propping his knobby fetlock

over his brother’s back, making it clear
just who’s in charge here. Instead the elephant,
patient and cradle-like, her back coated with clay--

a shade of orange the fox could envy--
has yessed to the body with a ponderous toss
in the dust. The flamingos in all their pink

promiscuity—permission to know your pith,
your inner parts: allow what you take in
to exude through your pores, god-like.

And the tiger? Sleeping twenty hours a day
dreaming the chase of meat, its mineral,
bloody taste—needs not any other world.



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ELIZABETH CRANFORD GARCIA’s forthcoming debut collection, Resurrected Body, received Cider Press Review’s 2023 Editor’s Prize. Her work has or will appear in journals such as Tar River Poetry, Image, RHINO, Chautauqua, Rappahannock Review, Portland Review, CALYX, and Mom Egg Review; anthologies such as Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems and Fire in the Pasture: 21st Century Mormon Poets ; and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is a Georgia native, a mother of three, and soon-to-be doctoral student at Georgia State. Read more at elizabethcgarcia.wordpress.com.


VOLUME 57 No. 2