Poem with One Fact

written by


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"At pet stores in Detroit, you can buy 
frozen rats
for seventy-five cents apiece, to feed 
your pet boa constrictor"
back home in Grosse Pointe,
or in Grosse Pointe Park,

while the free nation of rats
in Detroit emerges
from alleys behind pet shops, from cellars 
and junked cars, and gathers
to flow at twilight
like a river the color of pavement,

and crawls over bedrooms and groceries 
and through broken
school windows to eat the crayon 
from drawings of rats—
and no one in Detroit understands 
how rats are delicious in Dearborn.

If only we could communicate, if only 
the boa constrictors of Southfield 
would slither down I-94,
turn north on the Lodge Expressway, 
and head for Eighth Street, to eat 
out for a change. Instead, tomorrow,

a man from Birmingham enters 
a pet shop in Detroit
to buy a frozen German shepherd 
for six dollars and fifty cents 
to feed his pet cheetah,
guarding the compound at home.

Oh, they arrive all day, in their 
locked cars, buying
schoolyards, bridges, buses, 
churches, and Ethnic Festivals; 
they buy a frozen Texaco station
for eighty-four dollars and fifty cents

to feed to an imported London taxi 
in Huntington Woods;
they buy Tiger Stadium,
frozen, to feed to the Little League 
in Grosse Ile. They bring everything 
home, frozen solid

as pig iron, to the six-car garages
of Harper Woods, Grosse Pointe Woods, 
Farmington, Grosse Pointe
Farms, Troy, and Grosse Arbor—
and they ingest
everything, and fall asleep, and lie

coiled in the sun, while the city 
thaws in the stomach and slides
to the small intestine, where enzymes 
break down molecules of protein 
to amino acids, which enter
the cold bloodstream.

© Donald Hall