At the time this poem was written, my father was suffering from profound dementia. He was understandably disturbed by his increasing lack of freedom--first he lost his driver's license, then came the pandemic lockdown, and finally he was moved into a locked facility. So the runaway zebras, repeating in the news like a real-world anaphora, struck me hard. To convey the sense of his slippage, I leaned on an associative movement from fact to heartbreak.

Tina Posner has published poems in Ocean State Review, EcoTheo Review, Autofocus, Switchgrass Review, Ashes to Stardust (Sybaritic Press, 2023), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017) and poetry books for classroom use. An NYC expat and long-time resident of Austin, TX, she currently lives in San Diego, CA.

I: @tina.posner