To appear in my grandmother’s Christmas
letters, you must be either giving
birth or newly dead; the act of living
doesn’t pass the holiday litmus test
she keeps to the right of her typewriter
on the folded Singer sewing machine
by the window, where winter birds feed
as all in capitals she batters
data onto cold carbon-backed paper.
Why does it matter if she thinks of me—
a very smart rat in the city’s maze
of intellects, subsisting on reading,
unnerved by silent Sundays in my cage—
while she invents extinction in the species?