The Missouri Review and the Kinkajou

How would you react if you found this kinkajou asleep on you?

In the last year or so I have become really intrigued with bizarre news stories. Of course, these days of "alternative facts" instead of lies means we are in the world of the surreal everyday.

When I teach I often scroll through "weird story" sites --- most of the major news sources have them such as UPI "Weird News"  and weird news short videos from NBC New York.

Sometimes the news story itself can overwhelm the poem. Can the poem match the over the top quality of the experience or find another way into the action? Does weird news become weirder in a poem? In the poem, "99 Year Old Floridian Wakes to Find," I tried to find the woman's point of view and the connection between her own lived experience and this wild, unexpected thing.

Honestly, I fell in love with this new word (and animal) kinkajou and wanted to find a way to work with sound in the poem and the places where the human and the animal meet. I hope you enjoy.

Thanks to The Missouri Review for publishing it!

99-Year-Old Floridian Wakes Up to Find

~with a line from William Butler Yeats

In the morning she finds it—
a kinkajou curled on her chest


like an unexamined question.


Its tail loops around her waist
and the stubs of the ears twitching—

 to continue...