A pattering house mouse with itty pink ears,
the protagonist of a whole stack of cartoon baby books,
is now a giant hanta-tipped incisor,
its yellow claw of dentin axing
through the sheetrock, crunching away like almond bark.
It is unfazed by the hemorrhagic virus it hosts and spreads.
Despite how straightforward and polite it would be, poison
does not work.
For a mouse is wary of scrumptousness on a placemat.
It knows what it sees: easy food is a ruse.
It will sample everything, but if anything
gastric happens it won't return, just keep undoing
the gypsum wallboard of our home.
The only way to stop it now is by a bald-faced faceoff.
The fact that we don't relish exterminating the hero
we've heretofore know to be dressed in his smoking jacket,
reading a book in a mini wingback chair in the tiny living
room the other side of the mousehole
does not make us weak citizens.
A compassion for pestilence is our best quality,
even as we do it.
Bait Shyness by Steven Ray Smith | Lemon Poetry Reed Diffuser
$15.00Price
Steven Ray Smith is the author of A Two Minute Forty Second Night (FutureCycle Press, 2022). His poetry has been published in Meridian, The Yale Review, Southwest Review, The Kenyon Review, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, and others. His web site is StevenRaySmith.com.
