Quintin Collins
Would-Be Rats
Brookline, dawn: squirrels note the hour
on Pleasant Street. Squirrels
up and down tree trunks,
in and out of trash cans
near Comm Ave. Squirrels,
a viral tweet says, would be rats
if they came out only at night.
Bushy tail gangs loiter:
a half-eaten apple
in a squirrel’s jaws,
two squirrels zig and zag,
another squirrel stops and plots.
the next move. I stop and stare.
A BDP squad throws spotlight
into the morning. What dark
do they hope to chase
from this street? Squirrels know
the hour; though the dark
eases from the trees, daybreak
hasn’t crested the apartments.
The cops follow me
with the light. If I roamed
this neighborhood—multi-million-dollar
homes line these streets—
at night, what would they call me?
They turn their attention
to the road. A squirrel bounds
to a trash can for scraps.
The squirrel emerges,
a banana peel in its teeth.
In my teeth, I clutch what names
daylight affords me.
—Submitted on 05/11/2020
Quintin Collins is the author of The Dandelion Speaks of Survival, forthcoming from Cherry Castle Publishing in 2021. His poems have appeared in Up the Staircase Quarterly, Glass Poetry Press, Poems2go, Transition Magazine, Ghost City Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthology A Garden of Black Joy: Global Poetry from the Edges of Liberation and Living (Wise Ink Creative Publishing, 2020), edited by Keno Evol. Collins is assistant director of the Solstice Low-Residency MFA program at Pine Manor College in Newton, Mass. Twitter @qcollinswriter.
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