8 feet and 3 inches and a rat with wings

He was a greenish black like the rest of them. Birds with their feathers that look

like sheets satin across a bodied bed.

But the curves underneath them

swelled above and beyond and created mountains where mere rolling hills should have been. His eyes so much tinier, at least to mine, the feathers around them too billowed, and they looked at me in confusion.

Why didn’t he scurry away like most of them do, out of either fear or indifference of a four-chambered heart?

And cashews

almonds

white dirty and strewn, no

dropped or even thrown

humans so fucking messy as though

nothing is sacred.

All around you

you were cornered on every side and the salty chunks of protein did not lie at every point, but I saw

an entire 3 inch radius in

made up

of a millennia gone bad.

We had gone bad

and you were a casualty.

And there was nothing I could do

I was a paycheck victim and I wait on the platform,

on the train

it does not wait for me.

And there was nothing I could do

any wildlife vet would say.

And there was nothing I could do but look in those abnormally tiny eyes and say “I’m sorry we did this to you.”

As I walked away I noticed all along the brick wall the bottom where it met the cement a straight line of droppings,

for 8 feet you walked along the wall and were sick from food your fathers would never have chosen

out there.

And then you walked back for more like an impulsive me with my eating disorder at night into the kitchen again.

Right back to where you waited still for the end,

where you looked at me with almonds and cashews in a sort of circle of death around you on a Friday morning in Chicago in May in what was surely the last 100 and 10.