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Peter's Gorilla
He is home from work, salting the sardines,
and the jelly for roll top keyed tin cans
as shallow as a snuff box.
Peter watches his backyard tree.
At the titty tip top of the tree where only rooftops
are seen, Peter sees silver, a 1916 dime,
muscles, and movement in the black
premonition of dusk. He forgets to breathe.
A Gorilla five feet tall and five feet wide,
mercury touched, with a head of bricks,
shakes spring beans from the Catalpa tree.
Peter squints open the amber plastic kitchen window
blinds to reach further, to swallow his heart,
a water balloon filled with the silverback gorilla,
knuckling his yard and strutting, almost three hundred
pounds of strutting underneath the Catalpa.
Call the police?
His fingers are dumb at the buttons, as the gorilla
moves past ranch white brick to settle in the street.
The gorilla sits, a Buddha in the intersection.
He transcends cars honking past. He peels a banana,
picks his nose. He sees Peter seeing him from the front
aluminum outlined window, through his white plastic binds,
bent without a crease to watch without spit, the beast
sitting, admiring nothing, and everything.
A bird sings. Gorilla turns his head and knuckles to it.
A blue truck as old as the Gorilla hits him.
Peter stops dialing. The Gorilla is uncomfortably displayed
on an asphalt bed, limbs akimbo, a sundial, face perpendicular to the paper moon,
Peter’s balloon busts in his chest.
No ambulance for the monkey—the simian by the sidewalk.
He’s as human as any other creature on earth, not a coaster for a cup,
but a boned and muscled kind of man, slack-jawed to the sky,
as the shadows in the truck, watch him die.
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