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Poem: Simile

The way on green alluvial islands where the Zambezi meets the Cuando

the lions (cubs scanning smudged horizons as the father drops his snout in gore)

shake out a clump of vertebra and sinews in their teeth to extract the sweetest meat

so we might call it "merciless":

like that we rip reality from all the surfaces that flow

around us. And live in the amnesia of our doing it (I know I do) and so no end to war. And hate it in ourselves and colonize our drives and swallow them and so we eat.

By Peter Campion