This is why I love poetry: it rewards you for being irrational.

It gets dark earlier now. And it's colder.


First, there was a pool of blood.

(Well, first there was a possum, but he wasn't really part of it.)

There was a pool of blood, and my heart did what my heart does when there's blood where there shouldn't be. (Blood calls to blood, you know, and mine is always listening.)

I grabbed him up, my baby, my familiar, and he cried, and we ran, ran, ran through the dark--

No.

We rode in a car, not alone,
and I was polite, pretending everything was all right,
pretending my heart wasn't in a cage at my feet,
pretending I wasn't scared out of my mind.

(Never let anyone know how you feel and never be anything but polite. Let the fox eat your stomach.)

In his box, my small, hurt feline was silent, except for the blood.

Outside, in the dark, I had flashbacks,
but inside everything was normal: clean and white and civilized.
They showed us to a clean, white, civilized room,
and I showed them my baby, who dripped blood.

But kitty was kitty, except for the blood: curious and struggling and silent. It was a comfort.

When they took him away to . . . something, I sat in the blood-smeared room,
resisting the urge to tidy up.
It felt like my blood in the drops and smudges;
even the bloody paw print
--perfect enough to use should he ever be prosecuted for a crime--
felt like my blood, menstrual blood held back for just such an occasion.

I didn't wipe the blood away.
I just looked at it, thinking how well I knew it,
and at the fur that covered my shirt.
Stress-shedding.


They kept my familiar, and my soul, overnight.
When I looked at myself, I expected to see that I was bleeding too.

In the morning when I took him home, he wasn't himself;
dopey and sick, he wanted nothing to do with me.

I was scared I'd lost him another way--
lost who he is, that my little boy was gone.
It was lonelier than the solitary night I'd spent without him.


It's been two days.
We don't know what happened.
Though he has broken his silence, my familiar hasn't told.

He isn't quite himself yet, what with drugs
and stitches
and a mother who won't let him out,
who checks his private business.
But he stretches up for me to pet him

And he slept with me last night,
so I don't have to be alone.