Rats

Abstract

Rats Christina Stoddard (bio) A team in a lab trained rats to be terrified of the smell of cherry blossom,which took electric shocks and patience. It worked so well that when they bred the rats and piped a slight cherry scentinto the babies' cage, each new generation trampled one another in panic. A successful corruption in the code. I have feltsomething like this, my own ribosomes spliced for two hundred years with fear and obedience, a reverencethat I now struggle to leave burning behind me like a field, and when I finally gave in to the vowa man asked me to make, the weight of saying yes pressed down on my throat until it closed. In dreamsmy pioneer mothers turn me from side to side to assess my teeth and measure my hem. They followed a prophetover the plains until their shoes wore through, killing as they went and still calling themselves godly.Now that I am making a covenant worth twelve hundred miles of shallow graves and waist-highprairie grass, all my rag-wrapped ghosts [End Page 53] rise up from the banks of the North Platte and the Sweetwaterto offer best wishes, to tell me that heaven is mine again. But this ring I've agreed tois a bullying little prince. It yanks out my hair. Its pronged cathedral clogs with bread doughwhen I punch down the dome for a second resurrection. It slyly etches its likeness in granite and glassand I have never been careful with my hands. I can't stop clawing at its endless disaster,the flesh underneath growing welted and raw. From the kitchen window I can see our twin cherry trees,their branches just beginning to flower. [End Page 54] Christina Stoddard Christina Stoddard is the author of HIVE, which won the 2015 Brittingham Prize (University of Wisconsin Press) and was a finalist for the 2016 Washington State Book Award in poetry. She is from Tacoma, WA and has worked in the Czech Republic and Japan teaching English as a foreign language. She now lives in Nashville, TN where she is the managing editor of an economics journal. Her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, storySouth, and Iron Horse Literary Review, and she has been a finalist for Best of the Net. Christina is an Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly and Managing Editor at The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought. www.christinastoddard.com. Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press