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MADHUR ANAND

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The Rusty Toque | Issue 9 | Poetry | November 15, 2015

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ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR

"It’s just meant to be a fun and pink thing"
       acting marketing manager, JL’s Home Hardware Building Centre
 
In my fourth year as a bachelor of science student
I spent days at Storybook Gardens converting pink
flamingos into handsome statistics, complete with
disposable footmen, the deleted footnotes of
 
my lab assignment. Near the counterfeit Thames, behind
a fence, I looked for repeated behaviour, something
to count on. For instance, how often one leg was raised.
I made little strokes. And I bundled them together.
 
A certain number of feathers were ruffled. The first
hand was accurate, the second introduced errors.
I filled my sheets with means so suggestive they led me
to graduate school. I met a girl in the process
 
of enumerating the aggression of cichlids
and yet another who watched bees pollinate paper
flowers. One girl performed the Southern blot until
the sun rose. And then I saw there were girls everywhere.
 
And we danced in the aquaria and we danced in
the terraria and when the weather was correct,
we walked, in sequence, the entire length of the path
between the realistic river and grass-patched park.​

FIELD COURSE

Can't jog two circumferences of Exhibition Park
without heading straight for endangerment. Behind chain
 
linked diamonds, dozens of balls flood the court for a lesson.
Playability comes from internal pressure, pull
 
of a church key breaks the hermetic seal. Remove two
atmospheres, everything loses bounce. Not green, optic
 
yellow, for distance. Made from a form of rubber not
easily broken down. What is felt? What delays flow
 
separation in the boundary layer. I’ve never
thought of Wimbledon as a habitat, let alone
 
provision of habitat. Cut out circles in spheres
become waterproof homes for recovering harvest
 
mice. The mouse always finds the shortest path of return.
The long run projects just this: sweaty brow, matted blade.

MADHUR ANAND'S debut collection of poems is A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes (McClelland & Stewart/Penguin Random House Canada, 2015). Her poetry is also forthcoming in The Walrus.