To the Cat Lying in the Road
- Apr 26, 2019
- 1 min read
by Ed Doerr
The fragrant ink of your blood, twisting in calligraphic strokes, writes a story in pavement: padding out here, in the quiet of night, to watch stars drop from the sky, hoping to catch the dust of one in your twitching whiskers.
Once, I dreamed that desert roses sprouted through cracks in the plaster of my bare bedroom walls but wouldn’t dare divulge the intimacy of its meaning, so let me learn from that:
your body passes untouched beneath the underside of my car, & I leave you as I found you, your two back paws, mangy & caked with dirt, standing at attention, your open eyes panes of glass shattering drops of rain.
A self-professed Twitter obsessive, Ed Doerr is a teacher and the author of the poetry chapbook Sauteing Spinach With My Aunt (available now from Desert Willow Press). Other recent poems, essays, and fiction can be found in publications like Water/Stone Review, Hippocampus Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, Sky Island Journal, One Teen Story, and several more. For more, follow him on Twitter (@AuthorEdDoerr), read his TV blog (overstuffeddvr.com), and visit his website (eddoerr.com).
