Penelope Escapes the Platypusary by Bex Hainsworth

Bronx Zoo, 1957

Your disappearance was not unforeseen.

Dragged across continents, far from

the vast and unbroken heat of home,

you found yourself in imitation

mud and pool, encircled by foreign

roars and screeches. Betty died

first, suddenly. You must have mourned,

aching for the place they scattered

her frozen bones. Cecil was a perpetual

nuisance. In forced courtship, you

were Daphne, endlessly pursued

without the relief of laurel and death.

Journalists were willing voyeurs:

their headlines smeared you as brazen,

shameless, brutal, like so many women.

Cunning chimera, desperate for loneliness,

you stacked eucalyptus. Webbed paws

slapped dirt into an expectant mound.

Fooling keepers with your faux nest,

they doubled the crayfish and worms

as you guarded spectral eggs. Discovered

in your deception, four more colourless

years of captivity followed until that dry

July night. Surrealist creature with otter body,

you wriggled free like water, finally ready

for the journey. They never found a trace.

Perhaps you went out west, paddling

gold-speckled streams with beaver kin.

Or maybe you burrowed into a local park

by a pond, comforted by the splash of swans,

living out your days in oozing solitude.

______________

Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared in Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Ink Sweat & Tears, Honest Ulsterman, and bath magg. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by Black Cat Poetry Press.