Apricot Press

I woke not in my room, but in a trickling can—a slurry of gum spit, lichen-lipped bottles, and
ceremonial red-tape confetti. Rain-coiled. A gutter wide as a banker’s lie. My new mouth,
chewing through Styrofoam. Yesterday, I was a beetle—no, a salesman’s dream, a briefcase, all
hinge and urgency—and I died, politely, under a couch my sister forgot to sweep. Today, I am
fur. I am looped intestine in motion. I am the city’s clot—a rat!

And I still have not called in sick! O, the office. It sniffs at me. My desk—let me tell you of my
desk—was particle board and prayer, was where coffee went to curdle. They sent me emails with
words like synergy and quarterly goals. Do you understand? Even rats pay rent. There is a
landlord in these gutters, with a mousetrap heart and a smile like a receipt that never ends. He
appears just before sleep to read my outstanding balance.

Here, rats make a cathedral of garbage, pray with teeth, hymn the marrow. But these rats don’t
know me. They never met Gregor the cockroach—they whisper: ‘He’s broken. He still believes
in weekends, in days off.’ They don’t know I dream in cubicle beige. That I still remember the
patterns on neckties, the etiquette of hallway nods. I miss paperclips. I miss the copy machine’s
warm purr—like an animal that has accepted its tether.

Now, I lick gravy off someone else’s abandoned fork. There is poetry in this too, I insist, though
the only stanza here is the broken spine of a worm I did not kill but will not mourn. Gregor
Samsa, rat iteration, vermin redux, contemplates public transport as the sky vomits light into the
cracks between bricks. I must get to the office, I think, but the trains do not run in the gutters.
Here, in this opera of oil and runoff, I write memos with my teeth:

‘To whom it may concern, my metamorphosis is ongoing.
Please adjust expectations accordingly.’

The city above clears its throat with honks and sirens. How to avoid humans’ fear of rats, with
their snap traps and poison, so I can get to work in time?

She stood in front of the plums like she was reading
             a eulogy off their skin.
Took one, held it to her cheek like a returning soldier,
             then set it down again.
I asked if she needed help reaching (she was small,
             a thimble of a woman),
'No,' she said. 'Just remembering what sweet
             used to feel like.'
Her voice frayed at the edges—corduroy and dusk.
             Then she turned,
and I caught her eyes: two overgrown gardens
             lush, in greeny bloom.
I cried in the cereal aisle, quietly,
             near the Froot Loops.
There is no moral. Just: you can borrow
             someone’s sorrow
for a minute & it will taste like plums.

Photo credit: Nikolett Emmert