1 All violence begins with a mirroring. I dream of a low low crossing of newts or salamanders, or frogs some wet, delicate amphibian life. They are quick though, and disruptive to the group like rats suddenly, to the minds of some. Each day they cross there, in the mostly dark. I take a water bottle, or a highlighter, and begin to crush them – first, like a kind of experiment to see if I can do it – then systematically, until they are none. 2 Years ago, not in a dream, not in a poem even we had real mice, and I really killed them once I found their nighttime route. At first I placed traps everywhere, and they eluded me. My anger rose in little waves. I innovated. After I got the first one it became a nightly chore: to place the trap in the gap between the refrigerator and the wall; to wake up the next morning and find the new mangled little body; to take it between my latex-gloved fingers; to walk it outside in the growing cold; to release the dented mass of fur and bone in the high reeds behind my home. To walk back in the kitchen and clean the blood that had leaked or splattered by the trap. Every morning a tiny body. Then, finally, after 14 days, a reprieve. Silence. Until in droves the babies began to appear: blind little cotton balls wandering out in search of food or their mothers, who were no longer. Tuft of fur in a laundry basket, in a cupboard, in a sock in the middle of the floor. This is what broke me. They kept appearing. 3 Reader, sometimes there is a turn in a poem where one thing gets compared to another and you move onward to your point: a poem about cruelty, or regret the ability of humans to house and murder each other, or the ending of a relationship. Sometimes the poem just turns back on itself, settling on a final, terrified image it cannot linger enough to hold. 4 What is the life in me, delicate that tries to pass in the night?
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