Artist: Eighty Six aka David KlendaHe/Him/His

Off day at the zoo. No one came to work.
The gates were not unchained. No tourists tapped
At the glass, grackled, squawked, mimicked the birds.
And we were never fed. Three times a day
They liked to throw us parts: legs furred with hooves,
Hindquarters with the tail, heads with antlers
Or horns attached. Every beak grab a gland
And tug, twist, flap with all your appetite.
Get your gutful before they pull the corpse.
End of show. But the gawkers, they loved it.

(Those are the first ten lines of Cathartes Aura and the Apocalypse Zoo. It is a post-apocalyptic novel in verse about a zoo on the day no one showed up, narrated by a captive turkey vulture. It is written in ten syllable lines and ten line stanzas. It is 1000 lines long and the first in a series of ten. It is being published by Greg Bem’s Carbonation Press. Launch Week is the end of May. I am also a fiction writer and performance poet. You may have seen me at Terrain, Broken Mic, Speakeasy and more.)