Elisa Gabbert responded to my post about New Yorker Squirrel poems. Here's her Squirrel (literally) Poem. This "Squirrel" (?) first appeared in the Raleigh Quarterly
Elegy at Chestnut and River
Squirrel in the road, squashed
to an outline of itself: cute,
even in death. I can’t miss it
if I never knew it. Can I?
If I pick it up, it will weigh
either more or less
than I expect. Will smear
a little blood on my fingers.
It will smell rich.
It’s a squirrel: not
looking for a monument
or a headstone. It wants
to be left in the street,
the spot where it was last
alive, stuck in a running-
across shape. It wants to keep
running forever, but
it can’t stop stopping.
If you've got a Squirrel or Animal or Object poem that you think I'd find appropriate to post here with illustration send it to me please! I'm wanting to do a few more of these. If they strike me right, of course.
Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent. Her recent poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Diagram, Eleven Eleven, Meridian, Pleiades, Typo and Washington Square. A chapbook, Thanks for Sending the Engine, is available from Kitchen Press. She is also the author, with Kathleen Rooney, of Something Really Wonderful (dancing girl press, 2007) and That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths Books, 2008). Their collaborations can be found in Boston Review, Caketrain, jubilat, No Tell Motel and other journals.
And, sorry, no mocking.
1 comment:
dead squirrel haiku (after eg)
cute, even in death.
picked up, it would weigh more or
less than I expect.
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