Gophers
Used to go to the zoo by the freeway past a hill the color of straw, I remember the rollercoaster, its head a roaring tiger, its body chopped up like a snake, remember the ski lift slowly bearing us toward the lion’s pen, the safety bar just high enough for a child my size to slip through, thinking about slipping through, farfarfar below us more dead grass, fifty feet down my dad said, so this memory became my measuring stick forever, the distance between death and me. But mostly I remember the gophers—everywhere gophers, it was a poorly looked-after zoo, or maybe it was no one’s fault, I guess that’s the moral of Caddyshack. You could tell their holes by the lips of earth around them. Used to wait and watch for their heads, little brown thumbs—up, flick left, flick right, then down—always surprised, as if they’d taken a wrong turn. I loved them, trespassers, the lions were too depressed to care, not me, when we left the zoo I thought only of the holes, of the creatures we don’t invite into the cage, who in fact predate the cage, how deep they tunnel down.
Science Fair
Here is the truest thing I’ve ever invented:
A picture frame I drilled into
around the empty glass, the holes
plugged with Christmas lights.
The slender glass cylinders stuck
out from the holes like broken bottles
in a wall. I called it Memorial.
I was nine. In my imagination,
this was grief: a photograph
you could see even in the dark,
and this was mourning: leaving
it switched on. If you’re wondering
how I dealt with all the cord, don’t.
I simply didn’t. Behind the wood
was a thicket of white wire, wild
as ivy. Don’t ask me what I did
to hide it. Don’t ask me if it worked.
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Lena Crown’s work is published or forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Guernica, Narratively, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sonora Review, North American Review, and The Offing, among others. She lives just outside Washington, D.C.