Francine J. Harris

Natural Selection

Face it, says Trudy, white cats are sickly.  She wears Pear Fantasy.  She's got a bump up
on her toilet.  She can't sell a trailer this old.  She's got thousand leg'ged worms in the 
tub.  She's in Cherry Berry lipstick, walks with one leg pedaling like a bicycle, red. 

The city took the park because it's riverside. 

White cats might run all over but they leak from the eyes.  It's twelve of them now.  The 
long one with hamstring paws chases the white girl.  They eat and stare.  The windows 
caked with ashes and ants.  Long mewling, young.  A mattress on the floor for the
boarder, John. 

Cat piss and a gas leak.  She quit smoking cause John hates the smoke.  He won't be 
around long and he isn't home now.  Went somewhere to fix bikes, to drink, to ride.  Two 
of them are his cats.  He comes home late and sleeps on the floor.  He likes red lipstick.

He wouldn't dream of it.  That sweating lip and a crocodile patterned turtleneck.  With a 
stomach pulled into fuzz. And limp.  The greasy, gray hair.  The sheets turning brown. 
That talkatalk.  That licking egg off a front tooth.  Uneasy, unblinking rasp.  That lipstick, 
that red.

Raped her, she says.  Pushed her into a corner and got her pregnant.  He's not mine, she 
says.  He belongs to John.  She's too young and doesn't even look at him yet.  He's not 
nice. 
She climbs a wall he can't get at.  That ain't right.
She bites her lips to the hissing, swats at all of them.

Just missed you leaving.  Be back.

Every day is a rush.  At best a sissy.  A coward for having not called to cancel.
A gypsy who kisses midday.  A man afraid of blood in his sheets.  Every day
is another excuse.  A spoiled kid who pees standing.  A grunt in place of speech.  A beach
behind abandoned buildings.  A train car rolling country, unhitched.  The phrase that 
spoiled everything.  A soft, throbbing mud.

Where she puts her memories is her business.  I notice them falling
from the towels she carries upstairs.  From the basement she stoops.  Her hair is piled 
ponytail, to keep from pulling the roots.  So it reminds me:

A heel in rainy grass, toes off the curb.  Flecks of matchstick sulfur hurling at eye level. 
Drunken on a subway platform.  Swerving into empty lanes.  Shocked at mother's scars. 
Attraction. Window falling past her old wrists.  Nodding on the top rung of a ladder.

We avoid slicing into ourselves by shifting the light. 
Whatever we had yesterday is old, rough, sour.  Whatever got us here
is ugly, tasteless, understandable.  Things.  We want newer things.

Sometimes we catch eye contact and then we duck like rabbits.