November 2024
Bio Note: In August 2023 I received my PhD in eighteenth-century literature from Wayne State University in Detroit. Now I teach and learn online for Washtenaw Community College and Texas Woman’s University, and with my five-year-old. “Vehicles” is my first published poem. My essays have appeared in Creative Nonfiction Magazine, the Bear River Review and, in a previous life, Detroit-area newspapers and military vehicle manuals.
Vehicles
Don’t you want to see some animals? I hear a father ask his child
at the playground at the zoo
where human children are primates playing.
I observe my child; my child observes other children—
Pick one more activity, a mom says; Time to go, she says.
Screams, tears—she carries her child out of the zoo.
My child asks, What’s wrong with him?
The train carries us to the back of the zoo.
Can we go on the train again?
Can we go on the carousel?
Don’t you want to see some animals? I think.
Okay, let’s see some animals on the way, I say.
No, carousel now, he says.
We sit on some painted animals
circling.
The music stops.
Can we go on the train again?
The train carries us to the front of the zoo.
I carry my primate to the car.
©2024 Kelly Plante
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