Animal Farm

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.