Laurel Snyder, who writes poems, essays, and teeny-tiny stories, recently made a human being, and suddenly all the poems feel inadequate.  Her chapbook, Daphne and Jim, is available from Burnside Review, and she recently edited an anthology of essays, Half/Life, which will be available from Soft Skull Press in April.  Laurel lives in Atlanta, Georgia and is a graduate of many public schools.
 

Once there was a mouse.  She lived and ate seeds.  When the wind would and the rain, the mouse would and the rain.  A mouse does, you know.

Once there was a mouse.  A field of a mouse.  Brown as quiet.  Fall and the mouse was thin, too thin.  The mouse went a scamper.  The mouse met.

The mouse chattered and the magpies, from their posts.  The farmer opened a door.  The mouse had never heard of a door, heard a door.  The mouse crept cold.

The farmer and the magpies were too much with the mouse.  The farmer was warm.  He steamed in the morning.  The door was a hole in the picture.

Not his picture.  The mouse knew holes, knew steam, but.  The mouse was tired, crawled into a hollow behind a shed.  Waited for something. The mouse.

Not the shed.  Not the puddle. The mouse, crying, small, wanted a seed.  The shed weathered storms.  Whiskers said the seeds were elsewhere.

The bones were too small to be noticed.  The farmer’s feet were large.  It had been two seasons.  Picked clean and quiet.  So the mouse was planted.

© Laurel Snyder 2006