rat patootie
By lotus threads, Panda Wong, Hannah Wu
Published 21 August 2026
O symphony of crackle
lil rat dominatrix tell me
what to do pull my hair
with yr tender paw mincemeat
my fingers into the keyboard
gnaw on this email QWERTY
this spreadsheet let’s violate
health codes in every corporate space
lil brain jockey shimmy
my lil meat suit in & out
of the fevered cadence of
the rat race (a plague
by any other name)
group chat consensus: cancel Gusteau’s
(exploitative labour practices) cancel Linguini
(weaponised incompetence bf) cancel
Remy (class traitor) yeah we live
in a
societouille
O symphony of city
something ancient inside rats
recognises the telephone line tangle as vines
moving thru the city with an intimacy we
will never know they scratch their
secret rat names into the walls
in the night they ponticello
fuzzy lullabies to their babies
scritch their insatiable percussion
gutter choir of meep drain chorus
of squeak an orchestra
of rodent proportions blooms the dark
teems with its own
language own
song
O symphony of fang
seeing a rat in your dreams can
mean that something is eating you up inside
a rat’s teeth never stop growing always
in a state of permanent chew what does it
mean to move thru the world so hungry?
a hunger that according to Chinese folklore
started the world a rat breaking apart
the sky & earth with a single bite.
every half a century in India & Bangladesh
& Myanmar the bamboo blossoms en masse
bringing forth a rat flood of mythical proportions
that consumes everything in sight
a greyness descends with
furry intention nom nom nom to be a body
built for multiplying in a world
where everything else is going
extinct parades of endless
tooth if a rat stops gnawing
its teeth will grow
right into
its skull hunger’s
long past
pierces the
future
O symphony of effluvia
myth of collapsible
skeleton to fit
any opening rat-shaped hole in
Chicago (filled with coins
flowers Pokemon cards
oestradiol pills)
jacked Remy
in cake form
how we stuff
our symbols & signs
into living things hey rat
sorry i stuffed
you into
this poem
a tail as
old as time
apples rot
angels fall
rat you always
get the last bite
away from
the toothless
light
Read ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier’. Find new ways to see rats, research the rattishly unexpected. Write a version of this but with thirteen ways of looking at a rat.
Lotus Threads
#30in30 #PoetryMonth
Poetry illuminates all the ways in which we’re connected to the world, and the world is connected to itself in these overlooked or unexpected ways. Whenever I write poetry, I feel like that mycelial network that underpins the forest and the soil. It’s a relational technology - a way to make meaning with the world and with each other.
Panda Wong, lotus threads
#30in30 #PoetryMonth
