Giraffes Hum To Each Other Throughout The Night

The same way hyenas of grief travel

In packs, then circle your heart, what’s left of it.

What would the lions be if the lions

Pulled you down, which parts did they take?

The elephants in the distance

Know distance. Even years later they recognize

The bleached bones of those they have loved.

They stomp and sniff and cry out in deliriums

Of loss and move on once more. The buzzards

Though are counting on Good Luck. What they find

They find. They’ll take what they take when

The hyenas stop splitting sinew, bone and laughs

Between their teeth. Your blood covers russet desert,

Absorbed by it. I won’t be coming to save you.

e megg magee attended the first MD State Writing Project. Her poems have been read on a radio program for the blind and visually impaired on KQAK in San Francisco as well as on Grace Cavalieri’s Library of Congress radio program The Poet and The Poem. She was also published in WPFW 89.3 poetry anthology. Other publications include Maryland Poetry Review, Dancing Shadows, The Pearl, The City Paper and CCCO’s international peace magazine Fellowship. She co-edited The Pearl for two years and was the winner of Towson University’s Homestead III Poetry Scholarship for best undergraduate poetry MS in the early 90s.