Cat with a Mona Lisa Smile

Usually, I post Sunday morning but at 9:00 tonight I realized I forgot! Monday morning will have to do, I suppose. I was going to blame being tired because my cats woke me up at 5:30 this morning. Then I remembered I usually write my posts on Saturday and schedule them to post on Sunday. Oh well. There went that excuse 😆

So here I am, in the final hours of Sunday, trying to whip up a post. Since I’ve got cats and sleeplessness on the brain, I thought I’d post a poem based on a dream I had recently (something I’ve done before). Let’s just get this outa the way: it’s odd. No, it’s downright weird, which is why it stuck out enough to write about. This poem will be in my upcoming book, A Song of Glass. And who knows. Maybe it’ll end up in a second chapbook of cat poems.

Cat with a Mona Lisa Smile

I was with someone familiar
but saw only their shadow gliding 
along the blacktop and walls.
There were uniform buildings next to each other,
like warehouses or storage units.
Building shade fell helter-skelter on the pavement.

An empty cardboard box stood on end 
against one of the buildings.
A cat would appear in the box,
and, once it stepped out,
we would light it on fire
with what looked like an old shaving brush.

There were all kinds of cats:
black, orange tabby, gray and white striped,
skinny, stocky, long hair, short hair.
One gray and white cat with a flat face
(like a British Shorthair) 
looked at me with wide, glistening eyes
as it burned.

Some walked around after we lit them on fire,
and some trotted.
Every so often, the fire went out,
and we’d have to light it again.
None of them yowled or made any sound.
They just burned, and when they were done,
they disappeared.  There were no bodies.  They were just gone,
and another cat appeared in the box.

The last one was a blue and green tortie.
He was one we had to light twice.
We lit him; flames rose from his back,
the fur started smoking and going black
as he walked around,
but the fire staggered and went out
so I got the shaving brush and touched 
its smoldering tip to his back a few times.
The fur didn’t want to light but, little by little, it caught.

He circled between us and the building,
walked up to me, and looked in my eyes.
His were marbled blue and green 
with dark slits stabbing down the middle.
There was no self-reflection in them,
just a placid, animal’s gaze,
but then he flashed a Mona Lisa smile,
a mane of flames flailing around his face,
and held me with that smile

until he vanished.
Then everything vanished,
and I vanished.