SurVision Magazine

The Raccoons of Brooklyn


for Steven

sit outside my window all night
and discuss somberly the injustices of the world.

At first it's two or three but soon
others come straggling down the drain pipe.
They crack and tip

the trashcans, reckoning the neighborhood's
leavings with black, squishy eyes. They drag
wet claws through the discarded
brains and bones of cannibal crosswalkers

until they find it—a silver disc
containing evidence raccoons
and humans once occupied
the crotch of the same genetic tree.
Now they need an interpreter

and as luck would have it,
I'm an out-of-work cryptographer
with a history
of underdog sympathy.






Charlie Bondhus  is the author of Divining Bones (Sundress, 2018) and All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. He received his MFA in creative writing from Goddard College and his Ph.D. in literature from UMASS Amherst. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Missouri Review, Columbia Journal, Hayden's Ferry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Nimrod, and Copper Nickel. He has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers (UK). He is associate professor of English at Raritan Valley Community College. He lives in Asbury Park, NJ.