Poem: For Blossom, a $10 Hamster

Your God will know you

by the slant of your one white spot

and the way you don't cry out

when lifted from your cardboard cage

by the giant hand of a five-year-old girl.

In your two months you already

have become secretly pregnant,

the dials of your soft body

spinning through their complications

in the slave cells of the pet store.

Think, if you were rare, the distant sightings

and cataloguing, your steep and cordoned

habitat, the teams debating your very

existence on that clean pin-top of land.

Instead you, born in a clutch of sisters,

known only by your crooked spot

(though to your sisters you smelled like you

and your name was never Blossom),

here you are sleeping on sawdust

the girl tries so hard to keep clean,

and though she is not your God,

she lays a finger on you late at night

to feel your warm pulsar of breath.

And when the mean boy comes over to play,

she hides your box under the bed

and says you ran away,

her face on fire with the lying

she does for you, Blossom, as if

you were the last of your kind

on Earth, and she

was the only one who knew.

(appeared in Mudfish, 2009)