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featured poet – Jacqueline Gabbitas

Die Ratten Kommen

She asks us to make sure we properly close
the toilet lid in case (it’s summer) the rats
come up while she’s on holiday; but the flat’s
a couple of floors up, the neighbours’ roses,
clematis and ivy more likely to invade
– over the balcony, through the doors.
It’s there in the strangest things, this paranoia:
the way she feeds the birds, or how she said,
“muss zu lassen das die Ratten kommen
nicht raus” like it was, “pass the marg”,
or “good evening” and not some frigid symptom
of a home plagued by the world in all its largeness.
 

Jacqueline Gabbitas

published in Poetry Review, vol. 98:2, Summer 2008

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