Dangerous Playgrounds

The father is teaching his eight-year old

to clean a grouse, the purple-gray skin

pimpled by plucking,

and so delicate that one roughly-pulled

pinch of feathers could tear it.

With little bruises where

the shot went in.

If you push on the bumpy

sole of a foot, the toes

wrap around your finger

like a baby's hand. It's a reflex.

He says clean, not gut

as the other fathers do,

the organs slippery and ruby,

nothing soft, even the liver

rubbery, and the heart

hard as an unripe cherry,

all of it smelling

like neither excrement nor sex,

but something in between.

I often think about the doll's house

in "The Tale of Two Bad Mice"

by Beatrix Potter.

While the two dolls were out,

Tom Thumb and his wife-mouse,

Hunca Munca, briefly set up housekeeping

there, though it was a disappointment—

the miniature plaster foods inedible,

the lead knife bending on the painted ham,

nothing real, nothing as they expected.

In their disillusionment

they vandalized the place,

smashing the lobster glued to its plate,

jamming the fake fish into the fake fire.

It was a scene of seduction and abandonment,

the riches glimmering all around them,

and then the joke.