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Poem with One Fact BY DONALD HALL
"At pet stores in Detroit, you can buy frozen rats
for seventy-five cents apiece, to feed your pet boa constrictor"
back home in Grosse Pointe, or in Grosse Pointe Park,
while the free nation of rats in Detroit emerges
from alleys behind pet shops, from cellars and junked cars, and gathers
to flow at twilight like a river the color of pavement,
and crawls over bedrooms and groceries and through broken
school windows to eat the crayon from drawings of rats—
and no one in Detroit understands how rats are delicious in Dearborn.
If only we could communicate, if only the boa constrictors of Southfield
would slither down I-94, turn north on the Lodge Expressway,
and head for Eighth Street, to eat out for a change. Instead, tomorrow,
a man from Birmingham enters a pet shop in Detroit
to buy a frozen German shepherd for six dollars and fifty cents
to feed his pet cheetah, guarding the compound at home.
Oh, they arrive all day, in their locked cars, buying
schoolyards, bridges, buses, churches, and Ethnic Festivals;
they buy a frozen Texaco station for eighty-four dollars and fifty cents
to feed to an imported London taxi in Huntington Woods;
they buy Tiger Stadium, frozen, to feed to the Little League
in Grosse Ile. They bring everything home, frozen solid
as pig iron, to the six-car garages of Harper Woods, Grosse Pointe Woods,
Farmington, Grosse Pointe Farms, Troy, and Grosse Arbor—
and they ingest everything, and fall asleep, and lie
coiled in the sun, while the city thaws in the stomach and slides
to the small intestine, where enzymes break down molecules of protein
to amino acids, which enter the cold bloodstream.