Zoo Dates
Sarah Cave
for Lilah and Ursula
1.
Lilah colours the bear in her sketchbook, her white pencil filling the white paper between the black outlines; the aquarium curves in blue arches above her. Under this tent of sky-water, she and the bear press against the glass ‘my love,
I cannot reach you on all fours’
2.
Lilah cuts out card figurines on the floor of the empty aquarium. The bear paws at the seal meat left by the keepers above and paints an abstract with this sun-warm coagulation of flesh, her only medium. She wipes her story across the re-enforced wall.
3.
Lilah reads poems to the bear through the camouflage netting, the pages all ripped from public libraries; Thoreau, Whitman, Longfellow. The bear reclines, they think of what they might have been had they been each other.
4.
Lilah shines a torch through the water in the tank, the bear glides through its ray, she flickers an image of birds and canopy, across the bear’s translucent fur, whitewashed in the beam.
5.
Lilah sits alone in the marine museum’s auditorium, twittering her song of empty seas.
Sarah Cave recently graduated from Royal Holloway with an MA in Poetry. She has had two poetry pamphlets and her third chapbook, like fragile clay, will be published later this year by Guillemot Press. Sarah’s poetry has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Oxford Poetry, Shearsman, Tears in the Fence, Eborakon and Verve Poetry press’s It All Radiates Outwards.
E Devin Vander Meulen II is a designer based in Tokyo, Japan where he is currently visualizing ongoing research at NICT-情報通信研究機構. Originally from the beautiful Pacific Northwest, Devin delights in nature, coffee, and home brewed beer. His favorite animal is the flying squirrel. devinvm.com
