Today’s New Verse News: P-22
by Barbara Parchim
The famous Hollywood-roaming mountain lion known as P-22 is drastically underweight and was probably struck and injured by a car, wildlife experts who conducted a health examination on the big cat said on Tuesday. The male cougar, whose killing of a leashed dog has raised concerns about its behavior, probably will not be released back into the wild and could be sent to an animal sanctuary or euthanized, depending on its health, the California department of fish and wildlife said. —The Guardian, December 14, 2022
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you overstepped your allotment designated when we took over the landscape— wandered into the backyards of designer dogs that scamper like prey crossed the wrong freeways— a concrete grid overlaid on the land meaningless, artificial boundaries not mapped in your DNA how could you know only certain spaces were allowed? how solitary your existence far from the Santa Monica mountains the occasional park, a checkerboard of wild between our constructs what happens next is our decision as we decide everything in our dominion your celebrity may evoke some empathy as the wild slips away
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Barbara Parchim lives on a small farm in southwest Oregon. She enjoys gardening and hiking and volunteered for several years at a wildlife rehabilitation facility. Her poems have appeared in Allegro, Isacoustic, The NewVerse News, Turtle Island Quarterly, Windfall, Front Porch Review, Jefferson Journal, Cirque, and others. Her first book What Remains was published by Flowstone Press in October, 2021.