Toucan by Jessica Boatright

Description

My knowledge of rainforests
becomes encyclopedic, obsessive.
Home is built from fortified wire
a crisscross of curated branches

silicone leaves for easy cleaning.
I cage her on an elevated shelf,
worried otherwise she might dream
of the savanna’s hollowed trees.

 

Toucan is a single poem over nine pages, focussing on the appearance of a toucan into the lives of the speaker and her family. Surreal, tropical and grief-stricken, it looks to our complex relationships with the nonhuman and what happens when we have to say goodbye.

Jessica Boatright writes from a colourful house in Lincolnshire. Her words have recently been spotted in Magma, The Alchemy Spoon, Anthropocene and Poetry Bus, among others. In 2025 she placed third in the Disabled Poets Best Unpublished Pamphlet Prize and was highly commended in the Kathryn Bevis Memorial Poetry Prize. Jessica is founder of “Raising The Fifth,” a creative digital space for writers without children.

 

Printed on 100gsm ivory paperstock with 120gsm coral endpapers and a 290gsm black card cover hand-stamped with the braag logo.