bitten

Sometimes when I come home and the cats are spooning on my bed, I'm jealous.

February

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It's his
way of telling whether or not I'm dead.
If I'm not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He'll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It's all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we'd do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it's love that does us in. Over and over
Again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and the pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

-Margaret Atwood

revenge

You're up past your bedtime.
Is it because of the moon? Or is it because on the way home I ran instead of walked? Or the hour someone spent running their fingers through my hair (it doesn't happen often enough), the dark chocolate from the factory tour (who could fault me?), the newspaper clipping you slipped into my desk drawer?
I'm always dividing the world into threes.

The detox will probably take a while, and this makes sense.
My motivation--revenge--only makes sense when I'm looking backward.

His lips are full, but to play he must fold them in,
make a tight line of those wet curves. It is shocking
to see them sprout out again when he finishes playing a long
note, takes a breath. The sound he produces is never thin
enough,
cannot express I am a lost nymph in the woods without adding,
a voluptuous nymph at that. He has tried to take the wink
out of his playing, read the most obscure books on the subject,
even one filled with circus metaphors: Think tightrope; but
he is
always down in the sawdust, slapping a seal, pinching the
plump
curves of an acrobat. The audience loves or hates him,
there is no in-between. Those who pick at their programs
wish his solo were over, others cross their legs thinking he
would only
have to look at a bundle of green twine and it would burst
into flower.
Both flute and clarinet become breathless in their attempts to
outdo him.
The conductor who approached the podium resolving to
rein him in
abandons his brisk baton strokes, succumbs to swaying.
And the oboist, who has been whispering his sins into that
dark
wooden tube hoping for absolution, flinches as the house lights
come up, hearing want echoed back in each footstamp, each
clap.

-Matthea Harvey