The Paris Mouse

hunched over the greasy burner on the stove was noir, as in film noir, as in cauchemar, as in le nuit not blanche but noir, the dream you can’t wake up from, meaning she was a mouse fatale, licking the old oil glued to the old cooktop, feasting in her tiny hunched-up sewer life on fats & proteins for her bébés all atremble in their rotting poubel nest, so when I screamed my piercing Anglo-Imperial scream of horror & betrayal— not my stove, not my traces of pot au feu— she leaped, balletic, over the sink, the fridge, the lave-vaiselle, & back to the cave& the trash she scuttled, grim as a witch in La Fontaine who has to learn the lesson we all must learn: Reality is always sterner than pleasures of the nighttime burner.