Duy Doan
Tội Nghiệp, cat
Published in Poetry Northwest, March 2018.
With your one eye, your only eye, at a safe distance, you bat
at your sister, making contact just
above her eyeliner.
***
The week of the Champions League Final, three times you
snuck past me through the
front door. I took it to mean Messi
would steal behind United’s back four
and score.
***
Every morning around five:
a few pill bottles, the Ott-Lite, a coffee
mug. Crepuscular
motherfucker. I wonder if you’ll ever
let me get to six a.m.
***
In Vietnam I think they would’ve called
you little tiger. I think you would’ve made
some farmer a little money.
Severed rat tails by the bunch saving rice crops.
***
With a gob of turkey fat in your mouth
you leap down off
the counter.
Mighty hunter. The other cats never
take their eyes off you.
Scuttle
Rats can scuttle; they can also
bound. But unlike squirrels,
who also bound, rats scatter
much faster when a human
suddenly interjects itself
and makes a scene, revealing fruit
sprinkled naked at the curb.
Squirrels, when they scatter
and reach a safe distance,
slow their bound, like a train
fading into a station, welcomed by
a scuttle on the drum—stage
introduction for the rodent’s
scuttle across the lawn
before bounding, becoming
flexibly upright and entering
flight and landing for its
climb up the skinny trunk
of a crabapple tree.