POEM: KHUN RAT by Richard Oyama

 I saw a rat scuttle under a paving stone

In front of 7-11. He was slithy and grey.

The squirrel lives in the open, airborne

A trapeze artist skittering on a telephone wire

Into dark leaves. The rat lives underground amid

Filth and muck, feces and waterworks. He is

A creature of the demon-world. We hate him for that

For living in the lower circles. I see

Roadkill, soi kill, sun-whitened, flattened husks of frogs

And rats like shadow forms of the atomized in Hiroshima. 

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The rat is our double.

Richard Oyama’s work has appeared in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, The Nuyorasian Anthology, Breaking Silence, Dissident Song, A Gift of Tongues, About Place, Konch Magazine, Pirene’s Fountain, Tribes, Malpais Review, Anak Sastra and other literary journals. The Country They Know (Neuma Books 2005) is his first collection of poetry. He has a M.A. in English: Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Oyama taught at California College of Arts in Oakland, University of California at Berkeley and University of New Mexico. His first novel in a trilogy, A Riot Goin’ On, is forthcoming.