The Animal

Late capitalism, days that come as express trains
but go as silhouettes. The animal inside me starves 

while the sunset, like the tides, pools into cracks. The animal 
haunts my roots, arrives when tea burns the tongue or 

when toes are flexed, pleasure arrives luminous as a ghost. 
I forget to feed the animal, but still the animal remembers: the fabric 

of hospital gowns, slipping on black ice, every burn to the index 
finger. Once the animal and I went on a run to the lake and breathed in

its icy fumes. Once the animal and I met in a church parking lot
in Southern California to grieve. More than once I stood the animal up

with no apology. Other times I spurned the animal who came anyway.
The animal unpeels each of my clenched fingers like fruit. The animal has a soft

spot for the wind. The animal is not here, not there. Bewilderingly, 
the animal is in Silverton, Oregon, sitting in the grass, waiting

for the eclipse. The animal is lying wounded under the blue comforter 
of my middle-school boyfriend. The animal grips. The animal wants

to be held. The animal is awake. The animal lives in a dream. It is the animal 
that hears my grandfather’s voice for the first time since his death.

I sit at the piano and forage for a song that has survived the years. The animal
says nothing, knows nothing but how to place the fingers on the keys.

Nisha Atalie is a mixed poet of South Asian and European descent from the Pacific Northwest. She is a poetry editor at MASKS and her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Blood Orange Review, CALYX, Tinderbox Poetry, Breakwater Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2021 Eileen Lannan Poetry Prize and her poem "Do/Do Not" placed third in the 2022 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize.