The Jungle
In motherhood I begin
to celebrate my own
smallest accomplishments,
as when I wake to find
I’ve slept through the night
and I feel a little healed
because sleeping is something
I didn’t learn how to do until
I was an adult and had to read
a book about it because, I’ve
always liked to joke, I was
raised by wolves. I was raised
by wolves was, in fact, the very
joke I made in explaining
to a fellow mom as the children’s
theater went dark that, like my own
young son, I was seeing The Jungle
Book for the first time. I don’t
even know what it’s about, I said.
I was sort of raised by wolves,
I said and laughed, and then
the curtain went up and I was
shocked, of course, to find
The Jungle Book is about a boy
who was raised by wolves,
and I am shocked again now,
having just googled it, to find
the number one query
associated with Rudyard
Kipling is: Is the Jungle Book
a real story? People are dumb
is what I was thinking, I admit,
when I read that, but then
I clicked and clicked and found
that—oh my god—The Jungle
Book is based on the story
of a feral boy found running
on all fours alongside a wolf
in the Indian jungle, which is
funny to me because feral
is the word that has always come
to mind when I think of the boys
I grew up with: those feral boys
who moved through the world
with the ease afforded to those
who didn’t give two shits
about anything, who’d empty
beer cans in seconds, wrap cars
around poles, all the while joking
about fucking each other’s
mothers. They were feral
in the desert shooting guns out
by the airport. They were feral
on their skateboards in the Whata-
burger parking lot. They were feral
because they were allowed
to be, and eventually we’d all
get in trouble for what they’d been
doing, even us girls who—what did
we do all that time while the boys
were fighting and spitting
and calling us whores? I don’t
know. We were talking to each
other, I guess, which is how we
became human. But no—no.
Those boys weren’t feral. Those boys
were typical. They’d been born
knowing the world would be theirs
long after they’d grown bored
of nihilism and turned their attention
to capital, became men, became man-
kind, the kind of men who’d ruin
something if it meant they got to
keep it, who’d kill something
if it meant they could see it up close,
maintain the illusion of having
owned it, having earned it, even,
who’d track a boy and a wolf
through the jungle for days until
finally they had them trapped
inside their own den. When those
men found they couldn’t lure
the boy out with words, they forced
him out with smoke. And when
the boy finally stepped out into
the sunlight those men captured
him, bound him, and when the wolf
who was the boy’s mother came
following close behind, the way,
at intermission, I followed my own
son, who is by now too old
to come with me into the women’s
room, to the very threshold
of the men’s room door—when she
came out behind him, they shot her.
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