Harvest
Here I am, dismantling the bloodless cat,
all muscle and sinew and bones reed-thin,
bones that beg to be snapped.
Driving my fingers down to wrench back
hanks of tendoned layers.
All the time the cat, unfamiliar with pain’s
mute groundswell, regards me sourly.
Revulsion bests me. He shakes me off and
labors away, solid furry body
teetering on a nude spindle of jointed bones.
Here is my companion curled on a cotton
Lozenge while, dreaming,
I resculpt Mackerel
from the clay I made of him.
Here I am, stooped over a steel tub
In which, methodical and absolute,
I push him under by the scruff. I watch
for a struggle but he makes none.
Now the dreamer enters the dream.
Here is the calculated gleam of a harvester,
O won’t this be a great experiment to feed his limp body
through the meat grinder’s opened smile
And of the white meal he made, I crafted
another of him, and even awake I can
admire what a perfect likeness it was,
that inert replica of my friend.
Here is the genesis of
the calculated gleam: dead on the table.
The cat’s busy heart halved,
then flattened. Taking up
a pair of instruments, I practiced
embroidery on his opened belly.
Here we are not journeying
through a dream, though the unconscious
browses as if at market: inspecting
produce for nuggets of bitter and bundles of savory.
These it will keep in a paper bag until they ripen,
Serve back to me just before they
Turn. Lying taut atop the organs are ruddy strips of muscle
And clouding over, weather systems of fat.
Here are inroads I made through them with purple thread.
While I practice my slip stitch on the skin layer,
A tug against line
and two sheaves of flesh cleave together
Knife edge of spite. A dream can be a medium
where the soul channels joy, such as in flight,
but these are not those. Meet mine, dreams meant to
exorcise, the clean eradication of flawed self
the literate shriek, the weekly dre
