the berlin zoo

The zookeeper’s bathroom becomes a nest: dirt and twigs from sink to toilet, the bathtub a makeshift pond. The shoebill is part cartoon: beady eyes and a loafer for a beak. The zookeeper’s wife becomes a zookeeper, dropping a slice of stale bread into the bird’s smile. 

The zoo tower becomes lookout and barricade. A black gun as long as three men points at the sky, reminding airplanes that they are not birds, or that they are: as easy to down as a duck. The ears of giraffes and antelopes, built to hear lion paws on leaves, hold the sounds of bombs and flak guns. Their bodies tell them to run, but the cage bars say otherwise. 

Two hippos, a black rhino, a sea elephant, and eight land elephants become meat. People who thought the worst part of their job would be sweeping shit now eat their charges. Now there is more waste than ever to shovel. Now there are not enough dust pans in the world. Now the world becomes a dust pan. Now they must admit: tenderized crocodile tails taste like fatty chicken. Or maybe they taste like shoebill, but no one has eaten one, yet.

Numbers become uncountable. How many times is the zoo hit, in October alone? 

A baby hippo becomes a celebrity, rescued by boys who slip through flames and hustle it to a nearby pond. The pond does its North Atlantic best to become Sub-Saharan. The hippo grows big and shiny as a submarine. After the war, the city becomes a zoo. The wall keeps the creatures in the East contained, but their bodies tell them to run. The hippo sires 35 offspring and dies a year before the wall comes down. 

A checkpoint becomes a museum: Cultivating memory like a winter crop is what allows the people of the country to become people again. The only surviving elephant is named Siam, after the country that becomes Thailand. He outlives his bombed brothers by only a few years. His keepers say he goes mad. His brothers and sisters in the grasslands can smell an elephant hunter, even at the safe distance of a generation. Every elephant's brain is a map to a lost city.