Emma Bolden​

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Domesticated Animals

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Perhaps what I have been wanting is after all

a great stirring, the feeling of being moved if not

 

the movement a tree carries its trunk, stubbornly

ringing each year as if it were a luck, like any thing

 

that surprises you: a penny on a walk, a mouthful

of feathers, a fistful of song. Once a week the same

 

woman posts on a neighborhood app I am begging you

keep your housecats inside, the number

 

of species they have eradicated, extincted, etceteraed.

The woman is not me but I agree with her, listening

 

out of my window and into the dawn and the little

red throats of the little gray birds all working

 

on their charm. Imagine each ring in the tree

is a note. Imagine aching as a string, beak-plucked.

 

Ringing. The woman is not me, I agree.

Listening out of my window for the sweet little bell

 

necklacing the neighbor’s cat until he gets sick of it

and slides his body over the grass, leaving the bell behind.

 

Something to do with a tensing and untensing of the muscles.

I suppose. How I am to know anything when my own body

 

barely speaks to me. Is there ever anything besides a hiss.

Windowframed, the cat does what you would imagine. He

 

is practiced at his art. Licked lipped, tail swung, grass bellied

until pounce. A mouthful of feathers. A toothful of blood.

 

And all of the other little birds so quickly winged

themselves into air and away. It must have felt

 

like a triumph. It must feel like a beauty,

that kind of clarity. This kind of fear.

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