began as an ordinary rodent

gray, uninteresting

even to others of his kind.

One day city officials decided

to clean their filthy subway system 

and thought it best to show a film 

of rats scurrying over the tracks.

As a curious guy,

he attended an audition

as did a thousand other rats,

when they got to him, he was 

famished, and they knew it.

So they threw a slice of pizza

on a stairway step, and he went

after it like a mad dog, dragged

that thing down the stairs and

took it with him. They loved it,

even though it was an out-take.

And that’s what made him famous,

but things haven’t gone so well 

lately, all he got hired for was

stacking small lotion bottles

at a pharmacy overnight, though

as a rat, his daytime job is 

predicting subway arrivals

by feeling for track vibrations, 

never lost his touch. 



Gene Goldfarb lives in Manhattan, a recent transplant from Long Island. His passions are reading, writing both poetry and prose, movies of all kinds, and travel. His work has appeared in Black Fox, Misfit Magazine, Green Briar, Quiddity, The Daily Drunk, and elsewhere.