Thinking About Animals.

When we were kids, Clay and I
would collect coins tarnished with age
from a fountain and ride the bus
to the Lincoln Park Zoo. Clay would
swing from the grab handles and
talk about how big the sea mammals might be
and how he wanted to see the shapes of rats
inside an anaconda’s stomach. I stuffed
the coins inside my pockets and considered
what makes a bird a bird and what lets
a dolphin swim underwater and not drown.

One day in June, we walked through the gates
surrounded by statues of extinct animals. Their
claws are long and dangerous. Clay and I
ran down the paths covered in mulch to the
huge buildings that smelled like dirty bathrooms.
I never imagine a polar bear being lazy or
having the same name as my dad, and up close
their fur was an off-white, like a broken light bulb.

We got bored with the polar bears and ran to the
primate building, a large glass pyramid surrounded
by trees with plastic leaves and the ants that crawl
on them are plastic, too. Inside the building, apes
covered in the thick hair found on brushes
swung around like Clay on the bus and grabbed
their feet while rolling on their backs. A group
of kids on a field trip rubbed their oily hands on the
thin piece of glass that separated us from primates,
mocking their syllabic grunts.

I was by myself with a gorilla standing six inches
in front of me. He rubbed his pale palms on his
round stomach, then turned around
and squatted in front of me, digging into a stump
with a pointed stick. A dull ocean
of silver hair ran from his neck to his bottom.
I saw a beetle or some other bug with small wings
bow through his silver ocean like an overturned boat.
The gorilla prodded the bug with the end of his stick,
causing its guts to spill out like a smashed grape
His brown wrinkled and made me think
that only the kinds of bugs that
crawl on our skin make us different.