by Susi Lopera

For years I watch Lucky the squirrel’s shag-carpet 

tail flit across sticky La Brea tar pits

as I trek from home to school and from school to home. 

But on a one-degree-hotter-than-usual Monday 

the tar pits become flypaper. I doodle 

 

a tombstone in math class, its epitaph: 

Here lies a squirrel, brave in spirit. Trapped in tar, 

he left me behind to walk without him. 

 

That afternoon I spend 

practicing with Dad. I take a new path 

past home to the gym so I won’t have to see 

my dead friend, the squirrel. 

At the gym, Dad’s body drops. 

Ligaments slingshot 

from their other halves. One centimeter 

 

overshot to the left—in his hand, a racket, 

in the air, a ball—and Dad’s down, a stegosaurus 

fossil on the wooden court. Dad’s out 

 

of commission now, so I fill afternoons 

with chit-chat at the diner, but with one word 

the lady in the red cap behind the register 

shoves my mind to back to last Monday: “Ma’am,

would you like fries with that?” 

 

Last Monday, my birthday—the hottest day of the year.

When I watched Lucky move toward the center 

of the tar. When dad turned half-robot 

after the doctor slapped on the aircraft-grade aluminum 

knee brace. That day, Dad made Mom leave 

to get my present. From the hospital bed, 

he handed me a glass box: 

a Blue Morpho butterfly, skewered 

through its thorax with a pin.