inflated waist. Its haunches juddered

as the hot air ran through it and kept it

rampant, fat tail along the

sidewalk, clawed feet in the street,

talons cocked, and the face fierce,

savage—no mask for a rat—front teeth

fused and turgid, canines painted on,

whiskers painted back and down

along the neck, like reins. I walked on,

and there was another, smaller, huge

rat clawing across 51st toward the

construction on the hotel where my father had

stayed once as a little executive

from the West Coast,

and then there were two more rodent effigies

menacing and shaming. I thought of my poems

about my mother—she did indeed

beat me, but had nursed me with

her full, mammal breasts, and fed me

baby food, and taken me into

gardens, and smiled when I lisped to the flowers,

and when I could stand up, I danced with them

with her blessing. I was like my mother,

and she liked that, I owe her better

than I have given her. I’m glad I don’t

owe her my love, and anyway

I loved her—far more than myself.

I need to honor myself more,

so I can bless my mother.

New Year’s Song

The next morning, when I remembered

that I get to keep my thumb,

they do not need to go in and break it

again, to set it,

and as for the peripheral neuropathy

in my extremities, the numbness, the tingling…

I very much do not want

to lose my feet—and it came to me

I love my feet.

Life is a gift, a gift given

by no one—given by nothing, as something

may be a gift of nothing, and of

the everything that nestles unknown

in nothing. For a moment the core of my life

was not desire, but the knowledge of my unearned luck.

Sprung Trap

This morning, shapely mouse turds around a forgotten

sprung trap,

and little jet mounds of blood, and a spent match,

which turned out to be

a mouse paw and foreleg

gnawed off to free the rest of the mouse,

the tiny nails curved like multiplication in algebra.

My house has mice; the night above a summer lawn has fireflies;

seeded rye, seeds;

I feed the mice to the crows from a piece of tinfoil on the carriage

stone,

a series of upstate tin-footed mice,

a mouse farm. I would look for a long

time, as a child, at the picture of the hole

Stuart Little had gone into, leaving his cane outside.

In English books, boys were caned.

In my mother’s house, it was a whiskered hairbrush,

its tortoise stripes beautiful as a honeybee’s fur.

The first time—confirmed by independent news sources—

I was 9 months old, no brush yet, just the flat palm.

And my mother was a Stuart, she was born to it—

maenad who squeezed me out.

This morning, as a mouse farmer, I thought of Carl,

how he felt about his cows and bulls, whom he would feed, breed,

kill, sell, castrate, and help to give birth,