OLIFANT
And it’s cruel that they plop down
a mere kiddiepool for you in that menagerie,
your eyes eddied like lozenges.
Even at such quivertendering, they laugh so.
Such underbelly weighs down my lashes.
Now, you drop your headweight to please gravity.
They say you never forget, blinking, pensive,
but imagine your slinkyheart isn’t in chains
after all. Our mouths are full of dust.
I chew you a short straw and you nibble my shoelace.
Dragonflies scat over thick water.
With your Agape arm you swing history,
give sugary yawps to the nascent horizon,
wink, luxuriously as if to say très chouette!
We don’t need this Zoo sign to tell us about our species.
Your tongue is teasing.
Your ears are exhaling.
I don’t want to sit on your weary back,
I’m just trying to grow these ears,
but if you please,
never let me down.
Never let my body down.
Alex Braslavsky is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is a doctoral student in the Slavic Department at Harvard University, where she writes scholarship on Russian, Polish, and Czech poetry through a comparative poetics lens. Her translations of poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka were released with World Poetry Books in February of 2023. Her poems appear and are forthcoming in The Columbia Review, Conjunctions, and Colorado Review, among other journals.