Christopher Ankney
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An Embarrassment of Pandas
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There are people who get paid for inventing names
for pharmaceuticals, failed storytellers, perhaps,

who test the castrations of Latin families
and dock their portmanteaus on the surveyed

shores of focus groups. How can anyone of us
satisfy towards a singularity?

A mortician drew sperm from rich dead men
in tonight’s episode of my favorite show,

raised his own farmhouse of extortion babies
after disposing of their mothers.

A taxidermist scraped the fat from an extinct
zebra relative called the quagga. Thought

to be its own species, the man proved
it was simply a color variation for survival.

Turns out, the books simplified the times.
How do we not die for all the mythologies

we’ve put to fire: Metaphorically, no stranger
tells another stranger the whole truth.

Literally, parties are for fun. The young woman
who confessed she came up with Prilosec

on a notepad amongst other baby names
now fifteen years older, may have her own

children. I think of her seven states
away, because we only know she lived

in Minnesota from that one night, killing time
at a mutual friend’s Chicago apartment.

I’m reading to our second city of joy
a book about animals his brother

passed down to him. Who decided on a circus
of puffins, a murder of crows, a celebration
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of polar bears? Whose job is it to look in the eyes
of another being and draw up its public worth?

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Christopher Ankney’s first collection, Hearsay, won the 2014 Jean Feldman Prize at Washington Writers’ Publishing House and was a finalist for the 2015 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, Prairie Schooner, and more. This fall, find him in Cumberland River Review, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, and Poetry South. 

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