A Brutal Mischief, by Jefferson Navicky

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

What is it about rats that so disturbs us? Down which tunnel and into what hovel in our brains do they burrow? Rats are very good at hiding and one in twenty rats can detect landmines, know enough not to set them off.

At the start of the March 2020, when the pandemic roared and I got indefinitely furloughed, we discovered a rat infestation around our chicken coop. It’s been six years since the pandemic when I wrote this chapbook. I wrote it and put it away. It’s like a time capsule from a quiet time of terror, which, despite the surrounding drama, ended up as largely a very fond memory, because I spent so much time at home in our cottage in the woods, tending the animals, working and working against the rats, building our defenses, and hanging out with my love.

Jefferson Navicky is the author of four books, most recently, Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands, a Finalist for the Big Other Book Award in Fiction, as well as Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose, winner of the Maine Literary Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Electric Literature, Fairy Tale Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Beloit Poetry Journal. He is the recipient of grants from the Maine Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, as well as two other Maine Literary Awards for poetry and drama. He lives in midcoast Maine with his wife, cats, and chickens (and at the moment, no rats).