Why I Do Not Want a Christmas Tree

Because the snarl of packages inside our front door cannot be moved.

Because a great stuckness has taken root in our marriage and I do not know
whether we will survive it.

Because I can’t bear something else dying before my eyes. Because from the
basement with my own hands I have removed their bodies.

Because I wanted our place to be a place of refuge and instead it has become a
place of death. Because when I drew up a net of safety around us I did not
know that I would be required to place bait at intervals around the perimeter.

Because the mice which are now dying visited death on the baby songbirds
growing in their high house this summer, and I was the one to find their
bodies, heads gnawed open, on the steps below.

Because I buried the birds under the yew where none could find them.

Because the mouse who raised its head from the darkness of the birdhouse
when I flicked on the porchlight showed no remorse.

Because I could not bury the others because then what poisons they
possessed would make their way back out into the world. Because even
though it would take fifty of those mice to fell a predator the size of a cat,
there are such animals.

---

J.L. Conrad is the author of the full-length poetry collections A World in Which (Terrapin Books, forthcoming) and A Cartography of Birds (LSU Press), and the chapbooks Recovery (winner of the 2022 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize, Texas Review Press) and Not If But When (winner of the third annual Dead Lake Chapbook Competition, Salt Hill). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Sugar House Review, Salamander, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.