kitten

This poem actually got published in Mount Allison's student creative writing and photography journal my last year of school!

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Whatever is alive in the wind hates me,
Pinching me with its tricky spiny little fingers
Splintering like twigs against pale blue skin stretched too thin
Pointed teeth nipping at the bruised tips of skeleton hands
Leaves crunching like the snap of bird’s bones in a cat’s jaw.

The steps of the building crumble into the street below
Roots of trees older than the concrete rising like the spine of some ancient corpse
Ruination perfected by time, arched and twisted.

Under the eroding fluorescents, she was green skinned
Sickly and ephemeral with beads of sweat trailing between pale breasts
Smell of antiseptic thick and cloying, static of stale air surrounding us
Arsenic green wallpaper peeling at the edges as we met
Diagnosis: immedicable.
She smelt like rotting fruit and decaying teeth, sweet and choking
I gagged with the taste of her on my tongue
Thick and viscous she moved into me, curling inside my pores
Scraping her way down my throat into my veins and womb
I knit her a scarf and she wrapped it around me,
Squeezing until black spots dance around the glitter of her smile.

Cat got the canary.