I Supplicate to the Gauze Panther by Ryan Bollenbach
Jealous of the marsh
And what it could contain
I asked to join the Gauze Panther in Their house
I wanted to talk
I wanted help
To conduct a rite
To stop the green multiplying inside me
I did not love the marsh then
Felt something more elemental
As I secret-lapped the blood
Dripping from the eyes of the bronze statue
Risen from the marsh’s chest
The metal-tongue sting awakened me from dreams
With a strange liquid on my fingertips
The similarity of my pink tongue to the panther’s
To a brain peaking from skull split
Kept me writing in the night
The wind snaked into my tent
Letting in the alcoholic dark
I obscured exploring what abuts it
I needed a subject to anchor my verbs
To what could be seen
The Gauze Panther took me in deeper that night
Built extensions on the wall around us
Put duct tape over every open window
So we could spend all day watching
Documentaries about the Anthropocene
Inside I became a Trojan horse
A catalyst for my green disease
Primed to be taken tongue first
By the next smoke-haunted explorer
Hungry for a new life
The panther and I sat together in our hut and fatted up
One-hundred and sixty-seven finches joined us
For the centuries of our gab session
Their little bird lungs bubbled up like stars
And in the passing time
The big bang exploded around us
We drank beers and watched through the window
The bird bones dried in the sun
With them we made a xylophone
So we could speak with our feathered friends forever
I was scared we would run out of yellow yarn to coat our mallets
I was scared we would run out of sheet music to play at their wake
I was scared the austerity program would take me over from inside
But the panther’s pink tongue kept me present
The sound of tongue lapping water from turbid pond
Bounced off the hut’s wooden walls
Changing in pitch with every shift around a corner
I couldn’t place that sound inside of anything else
I couldn’t remember why I left my family
I dropped a clean plate with silver rims at dinner
And the summer split the domestic bliss
Into forty-million shards of enamel
The silence that came over us
Lasted the next forty-million years
Ryan Bollenbach is a writer and musician living in Houston, Texas. He is the managing editor of Gulf Coast, and formerly served as the poetry editor for Black Warrior Review. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Bennington Review, Quarterly West, Snail Trail Press, and elsewhere. Reach out on twitter @SilentAsIAm and IG at Silent_As_I_Am.
