Huge Rat Comforts Himself With Lies

The rat engineered to grow to the size of a human
has only two hours left to live. The laboratory has burned
to the ground. The rat suffered burn wounds, but these
burns will not be what kill him; it’s just that his physiology
is unsustainable when detached from specialized machinery.
So he has stepped out of the burning building, and for now,
at least, he is crouched in the shallow woods adjacent
to the employee parking lot, his whiskers the approximate
length and thickness of the needles of the nearby Ponderosa
pine. He is hiding, yes — though he has done nothing wrong.
All he has done is flee from the flames, which struck him
as a perfectly natural decision. Nothing rebellious at all
about it. He would tell them that as soon as they found him.

Mikko Harvey is the author of Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit (House of Anansi Press, 2018) and his poems appear in places such as Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, The Academy of American Poets’s Poem-a-Day, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019. He has received the 2017 PEN Canada New Voices Prize, the 2020 Philip Booth Poetry Prize (judged by Mary Ruefle), and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and Poets & Writers Magazine. He currently lives in Ithaca, New York, where he works as a writer for an immigration law firm.