Shove over, Dinah, and get your whiskers
out of my tea. There’s not enough cream
at this picnic for the two of us and I have dibs
on the scones. Or maybe the scones are ethereal
and multiply, loaf-and-fish-like, and will serve
me, you, and visions, too, if that rabbit flickers by,
fob a-glinting. And, now I squint more closely,
you are looking rather drab and squirrel-fuzzy
and a might translucent, too, hazy as belief,
the heather peering through your drift of calico.
It really can’t be you unless you are a shadow of
your former self. Or maybe you’re an elf, those ears
too kittenish for decorous old cat-dom to be sure. Sly-
boots, you are, drifting in on fog, dodo feathers trickling
from your maw. You’re not at all how I recall, more
skeletal and skulking– in a drowsy starveling way – the bones
more elongate and filmy, the skull no longer pertly, vaguely
heart-shaped, just vague and rather chilling. In fact, I find
myself uneasy and you’re not helping me one whit as you
purr into the void of this flurried afternoon. And I might
swoon into girlhood in this oddly feral heat and snip some
of the fight out of those caterwauling daisies but it’s so
bothersome to try to braid such swaying clumsy stems
into a chain that tethers only to its own flimsy invisibility.
Kate Falvey’s work has been published in many journals (including previous issues of DO) and anthologies; in a full-length collection, The Language of Little Girls (David Robert Books); and in two chapbooks, What the Sea Washes Up (Dancing Girl Press) and Morning Constitutional in Sunhat and Bolero (Green Fuse Poetic Arts). She co-founded (with Monique Ferrell) and for ten years edited the 2 Bridges Review, published through City Tech (City University of New York) where she teaches, and is an associate editor for the Bellevue Literary Review.