Guest Poem by Toby Buckley

Toby Buckley is an archivist and writer from Donegal, now based in Belfast. His work has previously been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee and The Stinging Fly, among others. He received the first Ruth West Award for Poetry in 2016 and an MA in Poetry from the Seamus Heaney Centre in 2017. His first pamphlet, Milk Snake, was published by The Emma Press in July 2022. He was a recipient of ACNI's Artists Career Enhancement Scheme for 2023-2024 and is currently writing about flowers. This poem is from Acumen 111.

Elephant Caretaker

I cannot imagine
stealing an elephant,
notorious as they are
for being difficult
to compress comfortably,
but elephant caretakers
use sharp
hooks to find the tender
parts of elephants’
mouths and inner ears,
the secret malleability
to make the beasts
into something more
accommodating,
and I imagine this
encouragement
by cold metal could shrink
anything down
to pocket-size.