poem
Volume 31, Number 3

Breaking News

And so we were stuck in this building
with an enormous aardvark going after
us, its claws cracking the walls and
breaking windows through which its
pale, searching tongue nearly got us
but we managed to dodge it and go up
to the next floor where the same thing
happened and we kept having to go up
and up looking for rooms to hide in but
finding none, no doors, no rooms,
only open spaces and stairwells and it
seemed at some point we’d be up high
enough that the aardvark wouldn’t be
able to catch us but it was climbing,
either that or getting bigger so we kept
going up and now we were starting to
feel it in our lungs and hamstrings but
none of us had any idea how high we
had to go to escape this thing since
there were no maps in the stairs, only
arrows pointing up or down as though
someone thought we were dumb.


—Ian Willey