A Panther on TV by Ryan Bollenbach
The Gauze Panther watches
My nose and tongue
Taste-testing the humid air reflexively
Suddenly I want meat
I let the ants walk up my tongue
Like I might eat them
Bend my tongue muscles
To make a sacred bench in memorial
For the late golden toad they have eaten
The ants call my bluff
Sit on my bench
Play chess
Eat junk food
Wander through the cavern of my nose
To lay in the breeze of the ceiling fan
I’ve mounted on my uvula
To not shred them on my canines
Is the struggle against instinct
I didn’t realize I hungered for
Until I passed
Into the marsh’s sunroom
And held back my every sneeze
Later I saw a program playing silently
In the screen of a TV
Floating on a pond’s algae surface
It was the Gauze Panther in youth
Stalking through the rain
They stopped to swipe a human baby
From its crib by an open window
A fresh baked pie sat steaming on the sill
In that black and white animated dream
The panther brought teeth to neck
As silent as a final Earthly wish
For bustling glaciers
The panther stopped
When that bare throat cooed ma ma
As the panther debated
The shadow of a cross
Grew long overtop the babe’s brow
If a child was swiped
And there was no one there to see it
Would that panther still a horror be?
The first universe eventually exploded
Into some other being
The first-bloomed flower stem
Eventually bled green
When the whistling wind played
A bend-and-crack nocturne on its back
I have eaten a Gothic castle’s worth of leaves
And I need them to burn
Because the space in my stomach
Where I keep my beauty
Is filling up
I wake in the golden hour
From food-heavy sleep
Chin deep in a mud-red pool
Coughing up algae
The whites of my eyes are the only clean thing
As I peer from the water
To find what will kill me
A chainsaw is somewhere revving
Breathing slowly on a sunbaked boulder
The Gauze Panther lies watching me
God’s hot hand rubs their stomach
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.
