Jeremy Ra’s “Janis Carter Lives in Gambia for Years to Rehabilitate Lucy the Chimp Back into the Wild”

Jeremy Ra inhabits the conflicted mind of chimpanzee caretaker Janis Carter in a poem from LARB Quarterly no. 46: “Alien.”

By Jeremy RaOctober 5, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Poetry

This poem is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 46: Alien. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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Janis Carter Lives in Gambia for Years to Rehabilitate
Lucy the Chimp Back into the Wild

I have a mirror that Lucy cherished
that I occasionally use to remind me
of my face, something other people saw.
But like her, I have lost interest.
Every day, the forest is a blank page we doodle on
with our foraging. And the night crumples
it up then gives us another page
blank like the mouth of daybreak.
It might take another lifetime to unlearn
my society—like how the idea of green
I was taught in print is never
the pulsing, curdling shades
I see on these trees.

But I still hold on to my typewriter
and when I feel the urge, write to the few
whose names I have kept in my memory chest.
Dear life, who pretends an image of me—
I almost feel my recording of events
is a betrayal of this life, a life
from which I could saw
myself off clean like a limb.
With each day, I see Lucy growing closer
to the other chimps—I feel her
almost forgetting me and the part
of herself that wanted
to be someone’s child.

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Featured image: Martin Gerlach. Friese und Füllungen aus Nadelhölzern mit Eule, 1893. Staatliche Landesbildstelle Hamburg, Sammlung zur Geschichte der Photographie, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (P1976.1005.34). CC0, mkg-hamburg.de. Accessed September 30, 2025. Image has been cropped.