Dare
I still
am horrified by the cat’s hunger.
– Gerald Stern, “Another Insane Devotion”
Well this is charming, I thought, the twenty-odd cats
descending upon the Rav4 as we arrived
at the lesson barn in Spoleto, the friendly toms
parading their fuzzy balls around the place, lounging
on sunny dumpster lids, diving in unlidded dumpsters
for scraps of human food. You are obligate carnivores,
I tried explaining, shaking my head as I tore pieces
of sheep’s cheese for them under the table.
In the rapidly collapsing light of Wednesday, the long-haired tom
with a skin infection rashing scalily across his forehead
that I told myself looked like it was healing
approached a disinterested girl in paddock boots,
maybe twelve, interested in her bag of potato chips.
Don’t kick him, I said to no one, to everyone. Don’t kick Swiffer.
And what are we anyway, obligate strivers?
Witness the relative struggle of smaller animals,
look me in my narrow face and deny
the bright wild-mint hill of hunger and its opposite.
.
Claire Gunner lives in Brooklyn, where she is an attorney for a legal services nonprofit. Her work appears in The Cardiff Review and Paddler Press.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 