Tiger

by Eric Robertson

There are 500 of my kind out there. Maybe less. 420.
You can understand why I'm defensive.
Pick my teeth with knife. Give an evil eye.
Just 420 of my brothers and sisters. My ma?
I don't know where she is.
Her fingers ornamenting someone's neck maybe.

So you can see I'm touchy.

Siberia is beautiful in the winter.
Birch trees all striped against the snow.
You can imagine a clear day.
An orange sunset against this.

I don't think about blood the way you do. That's for sure.
The earth spins me upside down.
I hear all the creatures that were.
So distant now. A trail of animal crackers.
A circus of silhouettes frozen on the horizon.
Crows picking the crumbs.
My memory like your childhood. That old.

Tony the Tiger selling cereal. Exxon gas.
Black Sambo a fictional friend. We all have beliefs.

I don't wear a white cloth bib when I carve my meat. None of that.
Not what you would call civilized. No no.
No factory farming. No conveyer belt.

I don't see blood like that.
Little drops rolling around some Styrofoam plate
wrapped in plastic. Red meat laying on absorbing pads. No.
When I see it I'm in it.
I hear it.
That's the closest I get to metal.
All that iron.
I hear it bubbling through my teeth through a clamped trachea.
I wear it on my forehead.
A giant bindi for my cousins in Bengal.