One eye gone. My cat lost
her right eye to the whims of
no-one-knows-what. it’s left
an unnervingly alluring
whorl in its place—a velvet
absence, like a knot
in a tree turned
inward. beckoning
vortex.
a friend says, now call her
One Eyed Jack or Tin Cup
Cat. I
refrain. I have
my losses too: root
canals. extractions. —dwindling
word retrieval, but most
of all the way my ears
now struggle to hear—me too embarrassed
to ask, what, what, so I go on,
confused, struggling inside
this muffled
cage—as if, believe it or not, a large
marshmallow engulfed
my head. This is it, the end. this
is where Future becomes
no longer
a given. I’m entitled
to the life
I’ve already lived, yes, to all
of the stops & yields &
do not enters I’ve blown through. but there are no more
do-overs. up
until now—even
at my worst—I thought my future
was a thing I had the right
to deprive myself of, not one that
peters out
on its own.
even this pip-
squeak of a nation of ours, I thought it was a thing
moving forward, not to be stopped. toppled.
dismantled. dis-
embowled by some random and preter-
naturally destructive Goliath sporting hair the shade
of my most
beloved son’s locks—look! a ginger!
do you see?! he’s a ginger! —
my son has expressed, from the moment
he could speak—could link
phonemes together and recognize himself
reflected in another
person’s eyes—loathing for the color
of his hair. perhaps this, this regime—this
atrocity—is where, unwittingly,
he was headed: to this empty
husk.
this mega-
lomaniac. this sad
excuse
for a creature.