pencil vs camera #63, by Ben Heine
Pangolin/Lion
Most often a lion just chews on them for a few hours and gives up
— Darren Pietersen
A lion stifles
with the size of his stench
brandishes the red-brown bush that flames around his head
all bristle and brawn
beastly rose
roped with acidic fury
a plinth of neck for the grand horror of his head, stretching
into the fang-house
that clatters and clatters
against this armoured morsel
this shock of Pangolin, fleshy stone, un-shuckable density
ripping his gums out
on the burnt
toffee chunks of the rough
lapped edges, pinching the roots of his teeth, bright
and bloody as pomegranates
his gape deflected.
Through all this, the Pangolin
is circumspect, could spend whole days tucked up
in the apse and arch
of its wandering
bunker body, since it knows
boredom to be an impenetrable coat, that the attention span
is the thing that bridles first.
~ James Coghill
James Coghill writes mostly about animals, but hopes he manages to do so in a socially responsible kind of way. He’s had poems published in Popshot, the Cadaverine, Ink, Sweat & Tears, and Verse Kraken, and has poems forthcoming in Fuselit and the Emma Press anthology of Homesickness and Exile.
