"Animal Farm" by Marcus Wicker

Marcus Wicker was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but now lives in Indiana. He is the poetry editor of Southern Indiana Review, the director of the New Harmony Writers Workshop, and is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana.

Animal Farm
by Marcus Wicker

Consider the toucan’s festive gold breast.
Its multicolored pecker, oddly cutesy  
& perhaps, a cartoon-comfort 
to the gym-roped Westerners
reclining on a beach in Costa Rica. 
It’s the same old song: good-natured
smile, hard work, a hat’s off kind
of attitude & before you can say
post-racial, you’re a Resort Toucan.
The benefits are room & board
but the cost is blood. Most times
it’s the closest ones—birds
of the same rainforest, same
quadrant, same tree—who give up 
your whereabouts to the jaguar. 
Quick as you got the gig, the boss 
is tossing you out on your ass 
all over some flipped umbrellas   
& a tourist’s scarfed thumb. So now
you’re roofless, alone, vulnerable
& the beast is licking his chops
in your mirrored aviators. Stifling 
too is the Midwestern Subdivision
in its treatment of the black squirrel.    
Science tells us black squirrels
have driven out native grey squirrels 
in numerous areas, but no bullshit 
in my development, black squirrels 
are relegated to lots with a view
of the highway. Mornings
they work shade for acorns
between homes narrow as Lincoln Logs.
History tells us black squirrels
can’t afford robust landscaping
but will pay their mortgage—
chair the neighborhood watch
if you like. Slenderizing, their night
of hair. They’re sun’s prey. 
They avoid overexposure, make tanning
trend. Black squirrels
they fit in, get along. Know no one.
They see other black squirrels & run.





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