Don’t Look
by Sonia Farmer
We suspected the tomato thief was a rat but not a mother
of five newborns, now four, fetal and blind to their crushed
sibling inches away on the pavement, where
an evening jogger, thinking they were aborted puppies, picked
each one up and arranged them in the gentle hammock
of her shirt before asking us, “Is this your house?”, its tenor
ringing with accusation, as if aware that I had indeed considered, if only briefly,
somehow ridding my young dog of her litter halfway
into her unintended pregnancy,
or of the rat poison tucked into our kitchen cupboard,
and even though I could see those long, limp tails
for what they were, we took the helpless wrinkled and grey things
helplessly from her soft belly into a hard plastic box and then
into our house and placed them on top of the same kitchen cupboard
holding that poison while we decided what to do, out of sight
from their disarming squirms and yawns
reminding me why for years I had a plan in place, like many women do here,
in case of emergency, to head to New York City,
not because I can’t, with enough money, find a doctor here
to overlook the law, but because I can’t live with my own cruelty
in my field of vision—your ex-wife
knew that too when she took your unwanted strays to the other side
of the island to abandon them, ensuring they would not find their way
back of course, but also so that these ambiguous acts of murder
or mercy could remain within the hard boundary of a carefully-guarded
blind spot, a yawning black mouth of shame and horror
up close, from which your life forever
moves on a deliberate trajectory away, glancing back
in the rearview mirror only to confirm that it grows smaller and smaller until
it’s reduced to simply a full stop, a pebble in the road or maybe
something else that your tire silences without ceremony, and you take in
the kind of breath that you know you will hold,
as if your next could either expose or exonerate you, gulping down
the air and with it, the toothless thing that once threatened to swallow you whole—yes
it is always preferable to be in the seat of a car or plane
severing yourself from the unspeakable act, instead of here, in bed,
trying to sleep, while just outside of the gate, where we later returned
the newborns back to their suspected burrow, four heartbeats
grow more and more faint, like war drums retreating
and making their promise to return.