POETRY

Self-Portrait as Eastern Wood Rat

By Nickole Brown     Reprinted with permission from University of Georgia Press
                                             Originally published in the Southampton Review
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Let us begin with my hair—​
that frizzy, god-forsaken mess sprung
 
like Velcro from my head at thirteen, that hormone-
fed explosion of caustic fuzz that laughed in the face
of any hair goop or oil or spritz we could find
at the dollar store. It was a middle-school tease, a homeroom
landing pad for paper planes and spit wads, half-chewed
gum and gummy bears, a regular sport at my school
 
with one goal in mind: to make the redneck girl
in her high-water jeans cry. My hair, not just
unmanageable or unruly or going through a phase but
a real fuckin rat’s nest—and that’s just what my mama said,
brush in hand. This, friends, is where the learning begins,
 
because what I didn’t know was only one rat
builds that kind of miracle nest—only one rat’s a genuine
pack rat—and that rat’s made for the land that gave
it a name. You see, I was wrong: I thought
a rat was a rat was a rat, but I should’ve known better
 
than to call similar beings all by one name, to hate them all
the same. This rat’s not the undifferentiated mass gnawing
wires of red-lined neighborhoods and subway lines,
not those garbage-lickers that make the poor feel dirty no matter
how much they clean. No, this rat’s a real forest nibbler,
wearing its growing teeth down on ground-fall pecans
and mushrooms, caching stems and roots, happy
for just what the seasons bring. And here’s what I can’t let go:
 
Despite the talk of rats taking over what we call
our world, this rat—forgive us—is nearly
extinct. It’s our fault, working hard as we have to
pave ourselves over, our best tracts strip-mined or stripmalled,
our mountaintops literally removed for a vein
of coal, because like a mistreated girl whoring in the back
of her daddy’s Chevy, it’s as if we want to throw away what
we were given because we were once made to feel
it wasn’t worth a damn anyway. This might be about
 
shame, like how I worked so hard to scrub
my tongue of the talk that, like me, came up
from this mud—like how I once said an old man stashing
a decade’s worth of margarine tubs and dirty magazines
wasn’t a hoarder but a downright ornery cuss, a pack rat
with his trailer-park tupperware and tiddy magazines,
or how when I told mama what happened at school,
she put down the brush and quit her fussing, said, baby,
they’re pea-green with envy is all, don’t you give a rat’s ass.
What I mean to say is I grew up
 
and figured how to shellac my hair into something
nearly presentable, to trick it into looking like something
it’s not, but still, when I look in the mirror, it’s
that little girl from Kentucky staring back. No. What I mean is
 
there’s this kind of rat who works on a single nest all its life
and lives in that one place til it dies, just as I can’t seem to quit
and leave this place behind, no matter how far away I move.
 
No, that’s not quite right.
Let me say this plain: What I mean is
I once thought myself white trash—that rat
of all rats. But now I know I was only listening to the trash
I was told. Because a close look at the eastern wood rat reveals
a creature maybe messy and more than a little
hungry but meant to be here and still holding on, gathering
sticks and branches, broken glass and dried shit,
crow feathers and rusted cans, wood screws and napkins
and candy wrappers, forgotten flannels and cassettes,
Barbie limbs and lost gloves, shreds of anything, just
anything it can find to
survive, all things sacred and profane to keep
safe and warm in a place it can call home.

EASTERN WOOD RAT

Neotoma floridana

Habitat and Range: Rock piles in deciduous forests. Its range, from New York to the Gulf of Mexico, overlaps with that of the lookalike Allegheny wood rat in the northern portions of the Southern Appalachians.

Description and Notes: This little rodent is also known as the "pack rat" because it makes large nests filled with objects it collects. To acquire its collections, the rat often invades woodland buildings and homes, stealing jewelry, porcelain, and even bamboo skewers and kitchen utensils. It arms the perimeters of its own nest with sharp items such as these, as well as thorny brush including black locust stems and American holly leaves. The wood rat defecates in a communal toilet (unlike woodland mice, who are not as fastidious). The species carries few diseases and is long lived (up to ten years in captivity). In the wild of Southern Appalachia, the wood rat eats acorns, berries, and seeds and drinks little or no water, like the desert kangaroo rat from the west.


A Literary Field Guide to
​Southern Appalachia

University of Georgia Press