This month's ashota assignment: in no more than 15 minutes, write a poem (or a short-short story, or sketch a picture) , about vermin and your birthday. Send the result to ashota (at) osric.com.

Here are some of the items we have received so far:

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I wake up on the lawn,
Right foot in the kiddie pool
Left leg in an antpile.
Fire ants.

A note from a tenor sax
Wafts across the neighborhood
Sounding exactly like the horn
On a Honda Accord.

Fire ants consume my flesh
As I spit dirt and grass
And wonder
Is it still my birthday?

- Plinko

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Each guest gave me a present,
but still, there was something...unpleasant.

They advised me to call a firm in
to resolve this issue of six-legged vermin.

"The money'd be well-invested--
Your party's become pest-infested!"

But the amount of cake that the vermin ate
was what caused the whole bash to terminate.

The guests all went home
outraged and upset.

Now I'm here alone
with my six-legged pets

And that's the real reason to celebrate.

- Chris Herdt

---

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it stashing my gifts
what does it need with a beer
drunken vermin go

- Randroid

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For my birthday we played in the park
Stayed all day and nearly 'til dark
We lit birthday candles near the lake
But raccoons made away with the cake

We ate hamburgers and watermelons
And none of us saw the masked felons
We'd had so much food we were hardly awake
When raccoons made away with the cake

Chocolate, coconut, everything sweet--
How many hours to make such a treat?
How long had this masterpiece taken to bake?
But raccoons made away with the cake.

We were a bloated armada & they Francis Drakes!
When raccoons made away with the cake.

- Chris Herdt

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Today is the celebration of my birth
It commands a great festival of mirth
But Alas! My cake is gone
My inlaws' verminous spawn
Consumed it to sustain their ungodly girth.

- Ben Flaster

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rat trap bait with cake
wait for the rat to take cake
eat rat cake on plate

- Randroid

---

on the day i was born there was nothing but pain
vermin all over, vermin in my veins.
(blast.)

- Leann Schultz

---

Rats!

Forgot her birthday again.

- Josh Landau

---

On my birthday
No one remembered
Except a mouse
Named Theodore
Who brought to me
a piece of red string
that I had pulled
out of a blanket
several months prior.
I did not want
to hurt his feelings
and so took it,
tying it around
my finger and
smiling.
I forgot the string
until someone
said to me,
"Is your finger
always that purple?"
Long story short,
amputations aside,
I hide my hand
whenever I happen
to meet Theodore
in the kitchen,
or wherever.
He would just be
uncomfortable if I
let him know
what had happened
with his present.

- Eve

---

For my birthday I got a dead gopher
From Dave--who was a total loafer.

He'd found it on the road--
Didn't know a tick from a toad.

A cop pulled up and said
"Did you pay the dead

vermin tax on
that bloody old carcass?"

Now that guy serves
as he deserves, a prison

term in Jackson
with a killer named Marcus.

- Chris Herdt

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Okay, "ashota" isn't really a word...yet. I was just looking at a box with a recipe for mashed potatoes and some of the letters were covered. I thought it was funny. Hence the perfect name for anything contrived in such a ridiculous manner.