Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Chance Encounters with Wild Animals” by Monica Kidd, which first appeared in Poetry Pause in September 2020.

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Chance Encounters with Wild Animals

By Monica Kidd

He cocks his elbow and his eyes flash 1942. 
Home on leave, steam from the train rising
swooning girls, hat boxes. An old-fashioned come-on, 
that elbow, inviting me for a stroll, the most forward
he’s been in fifty years. His tins of soup and 
rumpled suit. His widowerhood. These deaths
we drag around, screeching from our midden heaps.

My broken glance betrayed him:
a flushed bird. We were bereft.
But there was this: the way he rose 
to a pretty girl in the growling midday.
The way I blushed. 

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Copyright © Monica Kidd

First appeared in Poetry Pause in September 2020.

Previously published in Chance Encounters with Wild Animals (Gaspereau Press, 2019).

Monica Kidd is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Chance Encounters with Wild Animals (Gaspereau Press, 2019). Her most recent work is a novel, The Crane (Breakwater Books, 2025); she’s currently at work on a nonfiction book about coastal erosion, human health, and community efforts globally to live with an uncertain future. She lives in Calgary, where she also works as a family doctor. 

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