Your Friendly Neighborhood Gopher Trapper

I saw his ad in the paper:

blue-fringed, white-shirted, brown-skinned man,

pesticides in hand. He’s smiling as he’s

wrung out by the sun. Looks a little

like my father:

blue-mopped, white-collared, brown-skinned man.

He sweats onto the grass. When he bares

the teeth of traps, fresh shoots ask:

“why do you know so well how

little things die?”

He was little, once. Now rodents run

beneath his feet. To my father I am small.

He threw out the magazine

yesterday. Then he left to work

as the sun grazed his cheek: relentless;

vicious; heavy.