This is a Rat Trap
You’re dead,
but not quite dead yet,
skittering around
with crushed legs, in blood.
The shrieking doesn’t bother me so much
as the bucket of water in the pool
of the tub.
The energy of something live
between my hands, then dead.
Drying them on a napkin,
bleaching the blood, scraping
at the crusty parts later,
the ones I missed.
I boiled you until you began to smell swollen.
The serving
will feel like drowning in sand.
I know.
My stomach is filled with the fat of you.
Be aware:
there are children sat at the table.
Reach up
into their mouths and speak something
they’ll remember as bloody
but tinged with a rare lard.
| Meg McKeon |
|
levelheaded: This is a Rat Trap
While the idea of drowning a rat in a bucket with one’s bare hands horrifies us, even the all-knowing internet waffles over what to do with a half-dead rodent. That is to say, “killing” presents us with a moral dilemma even when what’s being killed is one of the grossest things in the entire world.
But this poem doesn’t waste much time on the moral quandary faced upon finding a half-dead animal. Instead, the speaker’s matter-of-factness makes the poem a terrifying expression of stone-cold murder. When she says, “The shrieking doesn’t bother me so much,” we read the speaker shrugging off the animal’s death moans. When she says, “The energy of something live / between my hands, then dead,” the speaker refuses to qualify her experience by taking responsibility or expressing pleasure. The animal is dead, she killed it, and that’s it.
And at the exact moment when we recognize the moral world of the speaker—when she’s washing her hands of those “crusty parts” that were once a part of a living, breathing creature—the poem takes another morbid turn. The speaker boils the rat and feeds it to children. Gross. And purposefully gross: when she boils the rat until it begins to “smell swollen,” when she repeats “fat of you” in the strangely poetic phrase “rare lard,” when she contorts “beware” into “Be aware,” the speaker is making a concerted attempt to frighten us.
The question then becomes: to what end does this frightening, this morbidity, come? One possibility is that the poem has a subtle political purpose, that it takes a hard-line on human consumption of meat. If the speaker can convince us meat is murder when it comes to rats (which are gross), maybe she can convince us all meat is something we should “remember as bloody.” Even if this is true, the poem also begins by reminding us of our own mortality. The speaker addresses a “you,” and while we assume “you” to be the rat from the poem’s title, the body of the poem never refers to a rat. It’s not too much of a stretch to consider it a direct address, so the poem becomes as much about our death as it is about a rat’s.
Happy (belated) Halloween!
– The Editors
