if you give a mouse a cookie

on false scarcity

It’s autumn, and I’m yearning a hole through my stomach. Trying to remember that desire is not a zero-sum game. Though I do love a little creature that lives off scraps. Takes only what will not be missed. This city is full of rats and mice, and they’re getting fat. It is not a crime to be so small and still get what you want. For a few years I only wrote about mouses. But now I can write about other things. Sometimes. Not today, though.

if you give a mouse a cookie

she’ll realize, for the first time, hunger. how

a single prism of sweetness implies further

sweetness. once, there was a gift, she tells

her fellow mice. such things are possible. her word

for holiness translates, in other languages, to sugar,

or to home, to satiety, or to a body riddled

with wounds. the mouse language is not so simple

as previously believed. little hides in conjugation. much

belongs in the future tense, which they call the tense

of hope. words can grow as long as their meanings

require, as with German Zungenbrecher. there is a word

for deserve, a word for yes, i do recall the famine

of my grandmothers, and a word, too, for

now, at last, we may ask for more.

PROMPT: Come on. Write about a rodent.

I’m so burned out. Tuck me in. Give me a cookie.

xoxo

S