Jefferson Navicky
Rat Kings

I was just learning to leisure, whole days spread out
like retirement's slow bloom when the rats crept in.

Once brazen in their day-time snatches, I beat them
back to night missions. Surgical in their precision, they

leave hardly a trace. I hear their teeth are molds for
deep digging machines that can chew through anything,

edge upon edge so each bite multiplies its reach, such
efficiency of mouth I'd like to learn, each word to cut

itself letter by letter into some better articulation of grief,
a sharper turn toward desire hard won. One in twenty rats

can detect landmines, know enough not to set them off.
No wonder my traps sit unsprung in the woodshed, their

bit of fat not enough bait for the rest to risk the death
they saw their king suffer. Carried out by the tail, big as

a small dog, his face crushed by the kill bar, the king
looked like he was sleeping with his hands tucked beneath

his chin. At least death was a quick snap. Poison is possible
in the future, but it climbs up the food chain. And to die

from bleeding out I'll keep as a last resort. For now the rest
of them - a few? dozens? hundreds? - live like dwarf kings

of yore beneath the mountain with their hoards of treasure
piled up around them from nightly plunders sleeping bodies

nestled together like a fur version of the small intestine,
waiting for a new king to rise, bare his teeth, don his crown.

Salamanders

My mother declared she will no longer remember
how to be a nice person once the pandemic is over.
My father is losing his mind faster in quarantine,
slipping down some slope greased with his favorite
memories. Who would've know that trip to Sante Fe
when I was twenty-two made such a deep groove?
In the lodge he dreamt a knock on the door. Up to
answer it, he found his own father. They laughed,
wrestled in joy on the carpet. My father once tried
to teach me to wrestle, but I gave him a rug burn on
his eyebrow when his face didn't slide well across
carpet. I swear it was an accident. I thought
my hands would control his head better than they
could. I forget I'm not always a nice person in memory,
that slippery surface, wet with misunderstood purpose.
Yesterday stacking the sprawling pile of firewood,
I uncovered salamander after salamander hiding beneath
dark logs, copper purple twists with a slight shine.
I took my gloves off to pick them up in cupped hands
to bring them to the safety of shade's leaves, their bodies
like a stream of water through the cracks of my fingers.

<< return to the Table of Contents for New Series #10: Winter 2020, Volume 5 Number 2