Natural Habitat
If I had been told I’d be drunk at the zoo,
I would have expected the zoo I grew up with: lopsided ratio
of swan boats to swans, bathrooms bound in faux bamboo,
coils of soft serve thick as rope. I’m sure this zoo
has ice cream too, but now I don’t do dairy. Besides,
it’s ten degrees out. Ten degrees and it’s night, painted stars
adorning my flask. The zoo is strung with lights; they’re calling it
Zoo Lights.
The carousel parades camels, emus, a manatee, all mounted on poles
in warning to anyone getting ideas.
My zoo had a hot air balloon. For twenty bucks
you could press your face to the safety cage
and guess which direction you lived in.
Once the flame had lowered you down,
you and your fellow riders would issue forth
to your respective primate houses, the way in which you walked away
the only thing still tying you together.
Like you’d jettisoned some vestigial ballast.
Here is too windy for balloons. My flask is painted
with stars, though I don’t recognize a single constellation.
At the end of the tunnel, a concrete room.
Lean my head on the seal tank glass.
Envelopes of shadowed fat
patrol the buoyant dark.
I wonder if the cold reminds them of home.
Such Harmony! Such Balance!
At the DMV to dispute
a fifty-dollar late fee
erroneously levied.
Ninety minutes in the out-
door line, thirty in the waiting
room with the air
of a ticket-choked deli,
and when at last
the fee’s wrested free, return
to the car, to the envelope
waiting, sign on the corner
reading 2-hour zone.
The penalty, of course,
comes out to fifty dollars,
and friend, let me tell you—
I have glimpsed the hand of God,
and that guy knows
how to balance the books,
can spin them like plates
atop His holy fingers, debits and credits
blurring into one
illegible miracle.
Collin Van Son is a poet and playwright from Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. He is the author of the chapbook How to Draw a Blank (Cathexis Northwest Press), and his play Two-Man Rule was a 2021 Eugene O’Neill Finalist. More on his work at www.collinvanson.com.
Photo by Sahir Sujahudeen from Pexels