Meet the ferals

I've had this saved as a draft post for two years. I'm really just publishing it for posterity, as they say. 

In the summer of 2013, I rented a trap from a local animal shelter to catch a mama cat and her only kitten. They were living under the foundation of a building in my apartment complex and I was worried our new landlord would seal them inside when they fixed the hole that allowed access to the space. 

This is Mama Mia. Unfortunately, it was not safe to release her back into the area where I found her after her spay at the feral cat coalition. I had two cats already, and though she had a room where she could be isolated from them, the stress of their smell, being indoors, and the surgical procedure contributed to her death mere days after this picture was taken. The vet estimated she was only about ten months old when she birthed her kitten. 

And this is Tigger, who is now almost three years old. Originally, I had planned to foster him for adoption but when his mother died, I couldn't help but keep him. He is a mama's boy through and through. He still spooks at sudden sounds. He loves every cat he meets but is terrified of new humans. He's so bow legged that he looks like a munchkin cat. I adore him so much I made him a Twitter account like a big dork. 

little dark lost

Little distant glimmers
Drop off alone but in sequence
They were only tiny rays
But without them I dance in the dark

Kitten Haikus

This is a series of haikus I wrote when Kiyoshi the Kitten first came to live with me.  Posted for posterity and my own amusement.


Short version of Yoshi’s background: I found him mewling in the bushes beneath my window when I overheard some children; “The cat is still here.  Do you still have that stick?”  No, I did not kill any minors that day. 

Serial Short: Part Three

The funny thing about dreams is the way they mix and match reality. It’s like playing cut and paste with the people, places, and pathologies that make each of us who we are. Perhaps that is why they lend themselves to pop-psychology style interpretations. We think we know ourselves fairly well, but a different combination of faces, locales, and situations might lead us to actions we thought impossible. All the signposts in a dream are familiar but they lead us to destinations we didn’t know existed.

We’ve skipped over again and are passing the last of a shitty joint back and forth in a studio apartment I haven’t lived in for years, in a town that no longer resembles my memories. It’s a one room cottage twenty feet from a major railroad. Its moldy walls are thinly webbed with ancient cracks and seem to breathe due to the sharp angle of the floor. Pipes with shoddy wiring in them encircle the room and run to a 30 year old furnace that hasn’t worked in ten.