Tips for Approaching Displaced Tigers

Tips for approaching Displaced Tigers

Don’t address the tiger with your perceived prowess in a foreign culture,

with the greetings you googled ten minutes earlier just to speak to him.

Save your moshi moshi’s, annyeong’s, chào bạn’s, ha lo’s

Your nǐ hǎo abandons a residue of spite in his mouth.

Leave your bowing and regaling of years abroad for someone who understands.

He might as well have been in a zoo

The way local house cats pull their own eyes back

Shape them into mocking slits that stare with their implicit biases 

Poorly imitate the roars that your tiger doesn’t talk in

And decorate themselves with stripes that weren’t meant for them

You will celebrate the acquisition of your tiger.

A “gotcha day”, the day that they “gotcha” from a foreign land.

Granted you a fresh start like some kind of suburban genie

A secret holiday, in which you celebrate the loss of his old life, and the coming of his new one

“Thank our God”

Please don’t talk about obtaining some other exotic in front of your tiger.

The sting of being a second choice burns true.

Stolen away in the night, wrapped in clothes too big for his own body

Another is commodified.

And though your tiger may question and grieve

Mourn for the life he could have had

Forget his past

nobody remembers either way