Zoo Love, Poetry by Ralph Monday

Genre: Personality, Life, Society

Zoo Love
by Ralph Monday

Four of them, four tattoos
in the dream, riding my back
like the four horsemen of the
apocalypse.

They were unwelcome tramp
stamps—one, two men looking
at a book, two others just blurred
words, and the last a huge zoo love
tramp stamped onto my lower back.

All were black bruises outlined
in heavy black shading. Upset
that someone had chosen these
for me, and I had to live with them.

Was I the book the men were trying
to read? Or, the two a dichotomy of
self asshole gazing at me as text?

Then, the letters rearranged from
zoo love produce leo, loo, ole, oleo,
ooze, vole, masks for the hidden self?

The zoo that I am in, the four tats
four sides walling me in, the zoo love
nothing but a bad colposcopy.

Animals in that zoo, the leo who takes
center stage, the vole scurrying about
unnoticed except as prey.

My deep, dark mind oozing sediments
of desire, fleshly fissures layered on
my brain like geological deposits.

Or, animals surrounding me like
gardened Eve before an unnecessary
fig.

Only one thing to do—go to the
parlor and get needled with zoo love.
I’m already a marked animal.

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Ralph Monday is Associate Professor of English at Roane State Community College in Harriman, TN., and has published hundreds of poems in over 50 journals. A chapbook, All American Girl and Other Poems, was published in July 2014. A book Empty Houses and American Renditions was published May 2015 by Aldrich Press. A Kindle chapbook Narcissus the Sorcerer was published June 2015 by Odin Hill Press.

http://www.ralphmonday.com/

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