Annie Stapleton

Still Lit
 
The day’s going down on the monkey house
when, watching them climb, he suddenly says,
“I gave a lit cigarette to one once. Doused
it in his own hand. Didn’t know what it was,
of course. I was showing off for my friends.”
And the new grief in his face is what proves
it – that no story ever really ends.
The sun goes down and the monkey moves
higher in the trees, but she keeps staring
at his life. And he keeps looking back.
They’re in this cage together, sharing
how his pals – now dads – gave him so much flack
in the zoo-smell heat with the sun going down.
As if they both remember everything
we know about regret. The monkey’s brown
hand, like his, pausing, then deciding
the wrong way. The whole red sky on fire,
and the world the way it sometimes gets,
the monkey climbing higher and higher,
the goofball friends with more cigarettes.
And all the almost human hurt and rage.
This is not that monkey, but he watches it
move through the twilight that grew through that cage
on into this dark, the hole in things still lit.

 

Annie Stapleton lives and writes in the Hocking Hills of southeastern Ohio, where she also edits for others. Her work has appeared in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, The Dark Horse, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best American Fantasy, Plains Poetry Journal, and The Reader, among others. annlstapleton.com