Lynette Lamp

Mercy

Lynette Lamp

1. My husband drew the line at killing a baby mole. But those tunnels in the yard came from somewhere. He drove the mole to the woods, left it there. Crueler than any shovel, but he wasn’t the one doing the killing. Like Pontius Pilate, he washed his hands of it.

2. Something had been nesting inside our daughter’s outgrown dirt-bike boots, slumped in a dark corner—insides full of paper scraps and dry pasta. The home was abandoned home when I found it, but I would have dumped the contents even if something were nestled inside.

3. Our child carefully trapped a spider in her room, freed it outside. She knew it was there for weeks, willing to share her space until it bit her on the ankle. I’ve sanctioned death for less: shit on my deck, bird body-slams on my windows. But while weeding my gardens yesterday, I tiptoed around a sleeping fawn, even though its mother ate my roses.

Lynette Lamp is a practicing family physician and recent graduate of the Spalding University MFA program. She has had previous poems published in JAMA (Journal of American Medical Association), The Pharos, and Annals of Internal Medicine. Lynette lives in Winona, Minnesota.