David Bottoms
Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump
Loaded on beer and whiskey, we ride
to the dump in carloads
to turn our headlights across the wasted field,
freeze the startled eyes of rats against mounds of rubbish.
Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still
like dead beer cans.
Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow
into garbage, hide in old truck tires,
rusty oil drums, cardboard boxes scattered across the mounds,
or else drag themselves on forelegs across our beams of light
toward the darkness at the edge of the dump.
It’s the light they believe kills.
We drink and load again, let them crawl
for all they’re worth into the darkness we’re headed for.
--The poem is five sentences long.
--The speaker uses a repetition of beer throughout the work--beer, wasted, beer cans, and drink.
--In the last two stanza the speaker plays on the image of light and dark, though the first stanza does mention headlights.
--The speaker implies a relation to the rats with the last line, implying that both the rats and the people are creeping towards darkness.
--The poem begins and ends with the subject as "We".
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