Yes, I’m a prairie dog and I live underground
because the world is often too much for me
with all those dangerous animals running around
looking to eat you if you’re off guard for a second.
Yet overall, it’s a pretty good life because there’s always
lots of sports on television, and we have a bathroom
in which one’s business is blocked off by an electric powered wall
that my father installed years ago when he was still working
as a lookout for several families nearby.
And most days I sleep in late and tell the teacher
that I’ll make up what I missed on the weekend
when it’s usually much quieter up above:
only the sounds of crickets, snails, and non-poisonous spiders
trying to get into our water supply that’s mixed with gin,
but not to the level in which one becomes a gin rummy. . .

Jeffrey Zable is a teacher and conga drummer who plays Afro-Cuban folkloric musicfor dance classes and Rumbas around the San Francisco Bay Area. His poetry, fiction,and non-fiction have appeared in hundreds of literary magazines and anthologies,more recently in Hymnopomp, The Stray Branch, After The Pause, Third Wednesday,Brushfire, Corvus, and Smoky Blue. You can email him at rumbatumba@hotmail.com.