Bait shyness
       

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.

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Copyright © 2022 Steven Ray Smith All rights reserved
from A Two Minute Forty Second Night
FutureCycle Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission