Jennifer Saunders

All I Really Need To Know I Learned From YouTube Videos (“Pack Behavior”)

with a line from Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Some days you’re a twice-folded prayer, some days
you’re the wind that frays it, but you’re never the body
that staggers away. Hyenas begin devouring their prey
before it’s even dead, pull entrails out of a zebra
still trying to break loose. Jaws deep in the flanks.
There’s no pity in a season of hunger.

Some animals don’t know when to lie down and die
and what kind of animal you are or are not
remains to be seen. Caress of grass and wood smoke,
slow rosying of dawn, that old weather-rhyme:
sailor take warning. Grief comes sharp-winged,
white-backed and breaking bones for marrow.

Enough hyenas can snatch a kill from a lion
if they come at her from all sides,
if they remember to act as a single shimmering thing.
You watch the kill over and over,
dog-laughter in your headphones, blood
on your screen. Pause, rewind, replay:
you’re waiting for the scene that never arrives,
eyes wide for some moment of mercy.
But the clan is nothing but hunger and frenzy
and the zebra goes down in the dust every time.

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Jennifer Saunders is the author of Self-Portrait with Housewife (Tebot Bach, 2019), winner of the 2017 Clockwise Chapbook Competition. She is a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Orison Anthology nominee and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Grist, Ninth Letter, The Shallow Ends, Stirring and elsewhere. Jennifer holds an MFA from Pacific University and lives in German-speaking Switzerland, where in the winters she teaches skating in a hockey school.