Poems
animal planet
new mammal upgrade. endorphins! i moan until april. starve myself into last year's jeans. absorb the backyard sun like a blade of grass, practice my tan like an indigenous language— in the master bedroom i replace the rifle on the wall with deer trapped in a frame—two necks twined like tree branches. i wash hippo sweat from bedsheets. the washer—a bloodbath. floorboard currency. i offer my afternoon taxes. if i were a seahorse, by now, i’d have a thousand. be gentle, be gentle, i say, as his hydraulic lowers onto my dolphin. in my silt he finds no anchorage. we bark all night, make guard dogs of men, sleep next to each other like mountains. sun-up, goats lock horns in a meadow of daffodils. i lose track of the pheromone trail. a sentence begins and ends. ant mill in a white desert. i undress myself like a piano lesson. rage locked in a room so small it can’t help but spill. two faced state, a coin-flip. which will it be—anima-animus? i say imagine: the last two white rhinos know they are the last of their kind. he says animals don’t ruminate over silly things.
Taha Ahmar Qadeer is a writer, researcher, and translator from Lahore, Pakistan. He received his BA in Psychology and Literature from Bennington College and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Washington University in St. Louis.