A few months after you died
I came home on a black and freezing night
to find a small cardboard box
on the steps outside my building
I opened the lid and inside
was a single newborn animal
hairless pink and clean
a rat a guinea pig I couldn’t tell
Was it moving I don’t remember now
why can’t I remember that now
It can’t have been moving
it couldn’t have
been alive
I considered my cat asleep
in my apartment would he
kill this creature if it lived
Did I have any milk
and how would I get any milk
anyway inside this tiny thing
that surely could not be alive
What kind of person
might have come and left
a baby possibly dead
animal there in a box
on my stoop what kind
If this was a test I failed it
I carried the box
three long blocks
to the river and threw it in
I have never so much
as in the moment the box went under
the surface of the water
stabbing and stabbing and stabbing itself
with the moon’s million obsidian knives
wished that I were dead
If death is a test I fail
If death is a test I pass
__________________________________
From 13th Balloon by Mark Bibbins. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press. Copyright © 2020 by Mark Bibbins.
Mark Bibbins
Mark Bibbins is the author of three books with Copper Canyon: 13th Balloon; They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full, named one of the best poetry collections of 2014 by Publishers Weekly; and The Dance of No Hard Feelings. He teaches in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University and The New School, where he co-founded LIT magazine, and in NYU’s Writers in Florence program. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and four volumes of The Best American Poetry. Bibbins received a Lambda Literary Award for his first book, Sky Lounge (Graywolf, 2003), and was a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. He lives in New York City.
