Bait Blocks
by Robbie Gamble
 
I told the welfare office
that there were rats
in the motel room
where they sent me
(the young mother said),
and I kept complaining
until finally someone
sent an exterminator.
He just put out a bunch
of poison bait blocks
around the room.
I said, “You can’t do that,
I’ve got 2-year-old twins here.
They’ll eat anything.”
He just shrugged.

It’s no stretch
to imagine some
cubicled policy-maker
rolling the dice,
casting down bait blocks
into all the dark impoverished
corners of the country,
hoping the verminous poor
will just disappear.
 

 
 
 
Figures
by Robbie Gamble
 
Ancient cave, cup of shade
a scoop in the canyon wall
 
the entrance littered with flattened
cans of Red Bull, tattery t-shirts,
 
a limp knapsack
silvering in the sun.
 
You can feel the fatigue
of those who rested here,
 
one more toehold on the long
clawing journey toward El Norte.
 
If they raised their eyes to the ceiling
they might have seen
 
two ochre stick figures, hand-in-hand,
looking down on them--
 
how many centuries,
how many passers-by,
 
O’odham people bearing
squash and castor beans
 
from Sonoran highlands
south to the Gulf of Mexico
 
returning with dried fish
in labyrinthine baskets,
 
succession of steady feet carving paths
up and down the Mesoamerican spine.
 
In the cool of the evening, this generation
will reshoulder their burdens
 
head past the sacred mountain on the left,
northward towards the bulge of Kitts Peak
 
bristling with crazy gringo devices
for watching and listening to the stars,
 
and somewhere up there
a ship named Voyager
 
inscribed with a man and a woman
and its path through the planets
 
slides further on
from home.
 
 
 
 
Robbie Gamble’s poems have appeared in Scoundrel Time, Solstice, Carve, and Poet Lore. He works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston.

“Bait Blocks” previously appeared in A Quiet Courage, and “Figures” was first published in the Fall 2018 Construction Lit Mag.