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The Smell of Rat Rubs Off

By J. Allyn Rosser b. 1957

Once again you’ve fallen for the lure

of his deferral, his quick eyes’ brightness

slinking from the pantry of the righteous.

Nothing half so sleek as self-licked fur.

Not that he forgot your boots, or left

A single high-aimed compliment unturned.

He’ll double back, affect to be concerned

when he’s the secret reason you’re bereft,

embracing you with his Houdini hold,

repeating chewed-off bits of what you say

so he seems loyal, you the turncoat jay.

You’d think by now you’d learn to be consoled

to know the soul he sold’s not yours but his,

though where yours was a hollow feeling is.

Source: Poetry (May 2006).

Biography

J. Allyn Rosser was born in Pennsylvania and attended Middlebury College in Vermont as well as the University of Pennsylvania where she earned a doctorate. Her works include Bright Moves (1990), which won the Morse Poetry Prize, and Misery Prefigured (2001), winner of the Crab Orchard Award. In 2007 she was awarded The New Criterion Poetry Prize for a new book of poems entitled Foiled Again, published in the Fall of 2007. . . .

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