Our first home’s previous owner
laid mousetraps laced with mirror shards
to make mice look at themselves
before feeding their faces. My father hated it
the way you hate what is yours,
hate what reflects on you, those bodies
of blood-stuck glass shining
like diamonds that shit themselves.
In each glass jaw he saw
his own mouth hung open,
his cheeks coated in peanut butter.
Poor thing, he said—poverty is always
a violent act—and with a dustpan
and black garbage bag, collected himself.
Matthew Gilbert’s work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, PANK, Sugar House Review, Redivider, and elsewhere. They live in Connecticut, and measure the general success of life by the ratio of trees to people wherever they happen to be.