- Among the Animals
Is there any habitat less natural than the lobby of a Las Vegas hotel?
Yet here we gather, hoping for some glimpse of the wild. And if this lions’ den is not,
as the brochures suggest, “a Mini African Safari,” it’s still oddly impressive—towering rocks,
the pride stretching out across them, and families crowding in for photo ops,
only inch-thick glass between them and the oblivious beasts. Mostly the tourists shoot
their own faces looking back at them. Mostly the lions loll, waiting for feeding time.
A recording tells us where they really live (a ranch outside of town), and what they eat,
and how they’ve come to love or tolerate their handlers. The recording tells us
that they get daily baths, their hair conditioned and blown dry, and we chuckle politely,
picturing lions vain as Vegas showgirls. Watching them lick meat delicately
from their handlers’ fingers, we are supposed to see them, I think, as giant housecats. [End Page 55]
Then something unscripted: a lioness strides across the rocks and bites her mate,
hard, on the shoulder. And how can he resist? Mounting, he thrusts four times, then pulls away,
rolls over, and falls soundly asleep. The laughter rippling through the crowd, the wives nudging husbands,
the voices of children asking what the joke is become part of the joke. And will you laugh
if I tell you that I see something sexy in it too—not in the lion’s pitiful work,
but in his mate’s open display of desire— the singular wanting, not the loneliness after—
will your reflection slide across the space between us and take my reflection’s hand? [End Page 56]
Chelsea Rathburn’s poems have appeared in the Atlantic, Poetry, the New Republic, Ploughshares, and Five Points, among other journals. She is author of the collection The Shifting Line (University of Evansville Press, 2005), and in 2009 received an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. She lives in Decatur, Georgia, with her husband, the poet Jim May.