On Picking Up a Whiff of Gas from the Utility Room
It was like the distant harps of angels,
A filtrate of furnace and towels
I’d used to wipe up the dog’s manifest
Destiny. It was a flag,
A minor rearrangement of molecules.
How many days until I noticed
The tube of titanium white
Had been tampered with, and on
The window sill, a mouse in the trap,
Dead long enough for bacteria to break
Down whatever was in its gut—
Gnawed cucumber, cauliflower leaf.
I thought of the crushed spine,
Lungs, the tiny smashed heart.
One year mice ate the tips
Off crayons I used in my classes.
This year it’s Lava soap, the grease-
Cutter. I have few expectations.
I love the beauty of the journey,
Like fishing. The light
Did its October hocus-pocus
Until the sudden crush
And mouse darkness came too suddenly
For the slow work of despair.
I should be grateful there is no cure
For curiosity—the twitching nose
And whiskers. I should be glad
It fell through the hole I prepared
In the long night. I did not check
To see if a female hiding
A new hoard in its body. There was no
Return address before I dropped it
In the dead letter bin. I thought
Of the odor they inject into natural gas,
The crater and splinters that could have
Been us, and I thought of the planned
Sacrifice, the spring-loaded clamshell
Of a trap, the tiny check mark
In the big book of life.
Bio: John Minczeski is the author of “A Letter to Serafin,” University of Akron Press, 2009. His recent poems appear (or soon will) in The Cortland Review, Shadow Hawk, The Tampa Review, and The New Yorker. A graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, he lives in St. Paul.