BLESSING THE ANIMALS

by David Chorlton

On and around The Feast of St. Francis, October 4 this year, many churches organize a Blessing of the Animals to which dogs, cats, bird, bunnies, ponies, chickens, and all creatures great and small are welcome.

Here’s a cat who’d take

the dinner from a china plate but bless

her anyway; she doesn’t know

the rules of etiquette. Consider the coyote

blessed when he stops in the middle of the street

and looks back at a pedestrian

his wildness has touched. Bless the starlings

who were fruitful and

multiplied from coast to coast, and bless

the common pigeon for

turning waste lots into food. Bless

the rattlesnake who curls up at a trail’s edge

by stepping carefully around him,

and save

for the jaguar who returns to

ancient hunting grounds

a special blessing that will follow him through

darkness. Shall we dare

to shower favor on the rats who climb the final

daylight and cavort

in yards and vegetable beds? Or spare

an extra prayer for the Great horned owl

when he is done with ferrying souls

to comfort and a resting place?

When the Cooper’s hawk is waiting

for a mourning dove, be generous as this world

in which an ocean is the predator

and a river is the prey.

David Chorlton has lived in Phoenix since 1978, and has shared home with many cats, birds, and occasionally dogs. The creatures who visit his yard appear frequently in his new book Poetry Mountain from Cholla Needles in Joshua Tree, CA., who also published the poems his white cat Raissa wrote in the late Clinton years (of a very concrete nature) in a little book called Gilded Snow along with her owner's commentary.

ANIMAL FARM 2021:3. MEGAWA, THE HERO RAT

 by Tricia Knoll

HeroRAT Magawa has been awarded the PDSA (The People's Dispensary for Sick Animals) Gold Medal for life-saving bravery. Magawa is based in Cambodia and supports APOPO's efforts to rid Cambodia of the deadly legacy of landmines. Magawa is an African giant pouched rat that was born in Tanzania in November 2014. He grew up at APOPO's Training and Research center in Tanzania where he learned how to detect the smell of explosives using his nose. Under the loving guidance of his human rat trainer,s he fully completed his training in 9 months and began to prepare to leave for the field. Magawa moved to Siem Reap in Cambodia in 2016 where he met his new handler Malen and began his successful career. To date he has found 39 landmines and 28 items of unexploded ordnance, making him APOPO’s most successful HeroRAT. Over the past 4 years he has helped clear over 141,000 square metres of land, allowing local communities to live, work and play without fear of losing life or limb. (APOPO is an acronym from Dutch which stands for "Anti-Persoonsmijnen Ontmijnende Product Ontwikkeling", or in English, Anti-Personnel Landmines Detection Product Development.)

wears a gold medal around his neck. 

Plain gray hero rat trained to stand up

on his back feet. He smells landmines;

more than sixty pieces of unexploded mayhem

in Cambodia. He alerts and gets banana. 

 

This acknowledgement comes grudgingly

from this woman with a rat trap in her garage

who has smelled rat urine on the lid of a steamer

in her pantry, who wiped up weeks of rat shit

under an antique cherry sideboard. Who when 

danger looms flinches from dream rodents

that scurry where walls meets floors. 

 

Today you asked me to find one reason for hope. 

You rescue orchids in discarded pots and coax

them into bloom. What I offer you after insurrection

and death in the Capitol is this: I give one rat

his due. 

 

Tricia Knoll recently spent more time watching events unfold in the Capitol than she did binge watching The Queen's Gambit. She is a Vermont poet looking forward to introducing a new collection of poetry this spring called Checkered Mates.

PROJECTIONS

by Cally Conan-Davies

Large blue letters projected over the entrance to the Trump International Hotel in Washington on Monday night read “Pay Trump Bribes Here,” an allusion to questions about President Trump’s business affairs with foreign governments. Photo by Liz Gorman. —The New York Times, May 16, 2017

I passed the old post office a week ago—
saw its new name and sighed. A cab slowed
for a red light right in front, its rooftop ad
read Rise of the Underground. I took a photo
from the opposite side of the road. No light stabbed
the dark entrance. But the hotel name and the ad
lined up for a bit an embryonic, eerie sentence.
The signs are multiplying. That night I saw a rat
at the border of Georgetown. It had died
but bright blood was still leaking from its head.


Cally Conan-Davies is a writer who wanders and wonders.

UNION RAT

by Joan Colby

KOHLER, WIS. — Talks have been resumed between the Kohler Co. and the union that's been on strike for nearly three weeks in Wisconsin. Tim Tayloe, president of Local 833 of the United Auto Workers, said in a text message Friday that the union and the company met this week, and will meet again next week. A Kohler representative confirmed to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that negotiations have resumed. Local 833 represents about 2,000 workers at Kohler's kitchen and bath-ware plant in the Village of Kohler and at a generator factory north of Sheboygan. The union went on strike Nov. 15. The union wants to do away with a two-tiered pay scale that it says unfairly limits new employees to roughly $13 an hour. Kohler has said its contract offer was fair. —The News & Observer, Dec. 5, 2015

The inflated rat sits outside the fence
Where strikers protest unfair wages
Or conditions no human would endure.
The rat has a pink snout, sharp fangs
And a large round eye, orange as a
Setting sun, lacking a pupil, soulless.
Its jaw is ajar, its claws
Like those of the wicked bosses
Who rip up contracts that say
Workmen deserve to make a living.

I wave, thumbs up, as I drive by.
My grandpa was a Wobbly,
Back in the copper mines, back in the day
When men were hung for protests
Like this one. I’d like to have a rat
To blow up every time I feel abused
By a misguided friend who thinks a fascist
Is what we need to restore law and order.
How satisfying it would be to park
That big ugly rodent in her driveway.
Better than just unfriending her on Facebook.


Joan Colby has published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, the new renaissance, Grand Street, Epoch, and Prairie Schooner. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards, Rhino Poetry Award, the new renaissance Award for Poetry, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She was a finalist in the GSU Poetry Contest (2007), Nimrod International Pablo Neruda Prize (2009, 2012), and received honorable mentions in the North American Review's James Hearst Poetry Contest (2008, 2010). She is the editor of Illinois Racing News, and lives on a small horse farm in Northern Illinois. She has published 11 books including The Lonely Hearts Killers and How the Sky Begins to Fall (Spoon River Press), The Atrocity Book (Lynx House Press) and Dead Horses and Selected Poems from FutureCycle Press. Selected Poems received the 2013 FutureCycle Prize.  Properties of Matter was published in spring of 2014 by Aldrich Press (Kelsay Books). Two chapbooks are forthcoming in 2014: Bittersweet (Main Street Rag Press) and Ah Clio (Kattywompus Press). Colby is also an associate editor of Kentucky Review and FutureCycle Press. 

THE KING OF CHICKEN STREET

by Rick Gray

Chicken Street, Kabul. Source: Streets of Afghanistan Project

Not yet fourteen, he swings on donated crutches like an old jazz hand
Brushing the bad news lightly to his orphaned platoon.  

Cute won’t work anymore, the foreigners are all leaving the war.                        
Our new mission is grabbing anything they abandon.

Slip thick blankets off their emptied beds, still warm with home dreams.
Seize their Pop-Tarts, some good glue, and those spittoons. I have ideas.

And the general’s long strategy desk we saw on that looted TV, he commands,
Smash it into firewood with your remaining little hands.

We’ll need the heat.  And the meat, he squints, lifting his right crutch and aiming
Its chicken-bloodied tip at a shadow taking cover underground.

The others understand.
Any rat alive, or close enough. 


Rick Gray has work currently appearing in Salamander and has an essay forthcoming in the book, Neither Here Nor There: An Anthology of Reverse Culture Shock. He served in the Peace Corps in Kenya and teaches in Kabul, Afghanistan.