Ojee

by Penelope Gristelfink


​Drooping tiger, his stuffing is older than you or me.
His holes have been plugged with cotton batting,
badly, like memories we can’t make congruent.
His insides clump together unevenly like refrigerated lard.
Black strings insinuate the pads of his paws, 
and his dumpling-shaped nose has shed its pink
for a silly-putty shade.  His fur is like the lawns 
in winter: yellow, scalped, patchy, a dry stubble.
I want to rub my soft cheek against it.
It makes my skin purr.  

Your love of him
has shorn off his whiskers, his Bengal stripes.
His tufty ear sticks up like a cowlick 
and has the legacy of being the only one.  
His green-gray eyes are flecked like stormy weather,
and obdurate with an anaesthetized glaze,
glass dials in a stalled out dashboard.  

Relic of your childhood, obsessed over, put away,
he sleeps in the drawer with your loaded gun.
He never comes out.  
He is not a toy anymore.

He has survived you.