Super Sized Series

 Mothering Part 2 

 

 

Percy as Thai

 

 Percy by Laurie Byro

Percy and I have a system. I praise him, he rewards me with song. He is the best cat I know, I tell him, named after Prospero, magic-man, smart, handsome. I am his human. He sings me to sleep, settles in on my belly for the night, wakes me

up to ask again “who is the most handsome?” We agree it is him, we cat nap all night. Often after he knocks himself out playing, and after our deep conversations, he allows me “my time” to waste at a keyboard while he tries his best to break the printer. In another life, he was a printer repairman and in this life, the machine is his rival.  We are on the third one. He has health insurance and an ID card from Nationwide. I worry for his paws as he sticks them down the printer, to see why his mama is so fascinated with plastic and not fur.

Percy and I have a system. I explain how he is the most handsome, Paul Newman eyes, and satisfied, he purrs agreement, head butts, goes off to nap, his routine, until he nudges my arm asking again, WHO is the most handsome? You, I say, you know this, it is impossible to lie to you.  
Mama, he chirrips, you are the smartest, say it again, how can you be certain?

I tell him about Sally, a girl before he was born and how she went out into the night, never to return and that is why he is not allowed to go out. No out, ever as long as he lives. He agrees he says as he is the wisest in addition to being handsome, it is a curse, but he’s okay with that. Tell me again.
Gorgeous? Me? Baritone purr. What a lovely system, he asks I tell.

One day I am sick and distracted, dosing with a cold I suddenly feel the house has gone quiet.
I tiptoe to the keyboard (sneak a my-time?) and when I look out the window, there is Percy! No, he’s strutting past the porch, proud head high in the air, I’m nobody’s baby. There is a family of raccoons who come calling for pot- luck supper, Friday night fish, leftovers scraped from the cat’s bowls.
They sometimes hang out under the porch, have union meetings, then bang on the window if they want seconds.

My heart pounds, as I rush onto the porch, calling Percy! He immediately gallops to me, jumps onto the porch, into my arms, I am crouched down ready to scold, hugging him tight kissing his head. His eyes beg forgiveness, he purrs and chirrips as a greeting “mama that was so wrong of me, I’ll never leave you again. Now can we play, and by the way, who?”  My heart pounds for a minute and I remember why we feared having children. Having a pet is a contract with heartache. “Percy,” I sigh “but you agreed we had a system.”

 

Sassie, the summer before she died at 12 cooling off with Mama Rachael Ikins.

 

Cherishing by Rachael Ikins

I didn’t dust for months weeks ticked by, there were cat paw-prints in the layer by the TV. I should clean that up I thought, but then your feet padded over me, my heart. 

I couldn’t remove those microscopic remnants of you in corners, skin cells, floating on sunlight slant that bisects here from our last Summer.

Your death was gentle as death should be no screaming ride down the interstate through darkness to the emergency clinic, the smell of urine, the disconnected voice of you, your unknowing teeth, pinching my fingers.

Your death foretold last March yet we chose each other, gambled to see how long we could run together.
We crammed all of your buckets into two drought-stricken, overheated, summer months, bags, and boxes of treats to control your fading.

That day, our eyes met, unmistakable in that stillness as loud as words you said “You will go on to play without me” I knew you knew and mourned, my shameful instant. “Oh, no, you won’t die,”
but your body was its own universe, black holes birthing, stars flaming out, a meteor on a mission, farther and faster away from me. 

Two days before, you pounced on a fledgling fallen from a nest. Too small to nurse, before I could see, you broke its neck. Your  clasp busted. Your collar broke, you almost ran in front of a car. There were omens everywhere in the face of medical statistics 2 to 5 years.  we got eight months. 

Was it because you came from a mill? On the drive home after,  the song, “Mother and Child Reunion” on the radio summons your mother to my mind. I cry for her who birthed you in a cage with wire bottom, whose feet never touched earth.

The day after and for several stuttering days, I found tufts of white soft hair,  curls you left for me on tree branch and bush, as your soul arrowed home and hovered for the allotted time before you outgrew even that. My back feels your heat at night in bed. I shoved those tufts in a pocket and look, they’ve felted themselves, a medallion, I embroidered a rainbow paw print on this solid coin, kept in a pink treasure bag in my pocket. 

I think of the nights we watched the news, Ukrainian women carrying their dogs in their arms to the train to safety. You rescued me and I would carry you, did carry you, through a war zone into freedom. The bones of a crate left empty, of scars we never forgot in our cherishing of each other. I kissed your head, our eyes met so present, a gentle death the way it should be, our hearts fluttering, mine skipped on while yours paused in my arms and I said I love you. 

From Broken Spoons    

 

 

 

 

Empty Nest by Judith Waller Carroll 

It takes so little
to make the dog happy—
her pill ground with chicken,
an extra biscuit.

How smoothly     we’ve shifted
our need to nurture:
my patience with the cat’s
rough tongue on my cheek,
his need to be carried,

the doting way you spoon
peanut butter mixture
into the log feeder,
scatter safflower seeds
for the cardinals
no matter the weather,

how delighted we are
that the woodpecker’s back,
how we celebrate
by mixing more suet.

From What You Saw and Still Remember, Main Street Rag Publishing

 

 

Two poems by Joe Cottonwood

Fawn Interrupted

On forest path we come upon
a doe in a ditch sprawled
on her side cookie-cutter position
mid-birth with belly chewed open,
entrails scattered around the half-born babe,
tawny-speckled head and shoulders
in daylight as if leaping
from the squeezing womb,
eyes open to flies while the hind legs,
the damp tail will wait forever inside.

Which began first, birth or attack?
Little fawn, was your breakout the last reflex
of dying muscle? And where waits the soul?

We protect mountain lions
from hunters in these redwoods and yes,
we need to control the deer population.
And the human. Probably one crouched cougar
watches right now from the bushes nearby,
guarding the kill. They rarely speak,
these felines, in silence they hunt
to feed their cubs, in natural splendor
they commit murder and abortion
though they wouldn’t call it such
and neither should we,
at least not among lions
but oh mother,
oh fawn.

First published in The Wild Word      

 

 

A feral calico cat

used to sleep in my truck
like a ghost leaving
the driver's seat warm
but gone when I'd arrive.
Heard me, sharp ears.
Sometimes on the console
she'd leave a bat with wings intact,
a baby rabbit, neck broken. Rent paid.
I set out kibble, she wouldn't touch.
Never bore kittens though I'd hear
nights of yowling, fights.
Later, her ears failed. I'd open the door,
she'd startle awake. Leap. Clawed
my shoulder once in her haste.
Near the end she'd eat the kibble
but still got skinny, ribs outlined. One day
I found the food untouched. She'd vanished.
Like most animals, she knew how to die.

I tell you this because a while ago
in the garage I found two children,
boy and girl curled together
in a filthy sleeping bag half under the truck.
On the girl, arms like wire. On the boy,
a scar like purple rope between ear and nose.
Eyes that hold fear and keep secrets.
I try to say Estas a salvo aqui — you are safe here.
They refuse to follow into mi casa.
Quickly in the house I grab fleece jackets,
a box of Cheerios, a jug of milk
plus bowls and spoons. I come back out.
Boy and girl are gone.

There's an underground railroad
of farmworkers up the coast of California
but my garage would be off the main track.
An hour later I'm loading corrugated drainpipe   
when a frantic woman shows up. She's short,
ragged, missing one eye. Her language not Spanish,
but with fingers on her face she indicates the scar—
those were her kids. With a mother's super sense
she's tracking like a bloodhound.
All I can do is point to where they slept
and offer her some Cheerios which she declines.
She takes the jackets. And then she's gone.

I return home after dark.
Running late that morning I'd left
the milk and Cheerios on a tool box.
Now nowhere in sight. Might've been an animal
except the bowls and spoons are upside down
on a smoothed-out shop rag, washed and dried.
Never see the kids or the one-eyed mom again.
Probably migrated north with the harvest.
This much I know: Later, maybe a year,
one morning on the console of my truck
I find a jelly jar of wildflowers,
a paper bag of pears.

First Published in Live Encounters    

 

 

 

 The Summer of the Kitten Mamas by Sharon Waller Knutson

I swooped up the fat Calico kitten
mewing on the stairs, put
him in my palm and took him
home and fed him milk from a saucer.
He’d crawl under the covers
suck on my nightgown and knead
my belly like he is nursing
from his mother even at age
thirteen and weighing forty pounds.
when he died of a heart attack.

Mom and Dad took into their home
the brother-sister skinny white kittens
with black patches on face and tail
playing on the lawn next door
looking for their feral mother
who abandoned them in the basement
and the tiny black Siamese
who walked in the back of the bookstore.
Both parents gone and the cats are thirteen
we inherit them and fly them to Tucson.

A bookstore customer sees the black
and white stray on my lap, falls in love
Returns with two daughters who wrap
the kitten in a blanket and the youngest
holds her new baby on her lap
in the backseat of the car, Even their dad
who hates cats takes turns cuddling.

When I can’t find a home for the kitten
with hooded eyes, a neighbor shows up
and says she’ll take her. I hate to part
with my baby but when I visit her she
is nursing a litter of kittens and purring.
The abandoning of kittens at the bookstore
stops at the end of summer but the mothering
if the rescued kittens never stops until their death.

 

 Gizmo and Shelly Blankman

 

Missing Gizmo by Shelly Blankman 

You disappeared into the darkness five years ago.
I don’t know why. People say you were only a cat
and that’s what cats do. But you weren’t just a cat.

Cats don’t shred calendars or stash eyeglasses under
a bed. They don’t steal pizza or chow mein from their
human’s plate or drink from their straws, and they don’t hitch

rides on the hips of dogs six times their size. You’d greet me
each morning by leaping on my shoulder, slept by my side
whenever I was down, drew blood with your nips whenever

we played, and then look at me innocently like a child, as if
to say, “What did I do?” when you knew. I’d just laugh, and
you knew I’d do that, too. You’d lick my tears dry when I was sad,

and when I was sick, you’d curl your body around my neck like
a scarf, and stay with me until I’d fall asleep to the lullaby of your
purrs. But you were sick. Almost from the time you rescued me.

Maybe at some point, you’d had enough of vets’ visits; I’ll
never know. We hired two search dogs to find you, posted
ads, knocked on doors, cruised neighborhoods. Nothing.

Still, I wait. Every time I leave the house. Each corner I turn,
each yard I pass, I look for you. Each bush that rustles, I hope
it’s you — exhausted, starved, desperate to find your way home.

After four years, I still wait for you to lick my tears away.

previously published in Silver Birch Press