November’s cold enough to make me
linger in the hothouse, eyeing an okapi
bucking its extinction in the Congo
here, in a deserted zoo in Hampshire.
Braving the chill, I come close enough
to touch a rhino – and would, just to
break the lie I tell myself about its skin:
nothing can be that tough, living.
Light fades, saving these from my
distraction, from that strange sense
slipping from me now, between the dusk
and night – part shadow, part instinct,
the future of some memory’s adaptation,
impatient at the rate of change.
About The Author
Craig’s poems have been published in Acumen, Agenda, Antiphon, Butcher’s Dog, Crannóg, The Dark Horse, The Frogmore Papers, Ink, Sweat and Tears, The Interpreter’s House, Lighten Up Online, The Literary Hatchet, The London Magazine, Magma, Neon, New Welsh Review, The North, Orbis, Pennine Platform, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Prole, The Rialto, Stand, Southword, THINK and Under The Radar.
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