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Baber, Bill |
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Cancel, Charlie |
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Owen, Deidre J. |
Park, Jon |
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Plath, Rob |
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the
smallest feline is a masterpiece— da vinci/i hear my cat
crying by Rob Plath i hear my cat
crying in the little room where they’re taking her blood but i’m not
allowed in & she doesn’t
understand why they’re doing
this holding
her down sticking needles
in her hind leg stealing her blood but still she
doesn’t scratch or bite doctor or tech she just cries & i think
about how i used to violently vomit every morning for a year when she was a kitten & how she’d
push the bathroom door
open tiptoe in & stand there
checking on me & i want to run in there pull the needles
out & pick her up
& hug her & run to the car & never return i once read that centuries ago it was thought
that tears were made from
broken parts of the heart & i remember
as my mother lay dying the blood that often trickled from her right eye like some myth about a statue of a saint in some tiny
village somewhere & now as my cat cries & days later
when on the phone w/ the vet as she explains about bone marrow biopsies & oncologists i don’t believe
in lacrimal glands at all as wet threads of
my heart rise up &
collect in my eyes
no typewriter
or ABCs necessary by Rob Plath often my poems are falling from the mouth of my old wooden schoolhouse desk that’s stuffed
w/ them & if i’m not looking my cat will sink her fangs into pages she’s my best
critic & knows
goddamn well that all this
scribbling is such bullshit even the poems
about her milk-white
whiskers fanned out in
moonbeams or
her diamond yellow eyes calmly blinking at
me during
a thunderstorm she’d much rather
i just sit w/ her my hands instead brailling the buttons of her
backbone or rubbing her
belly b/c she is it—poetry incarnate
my cat sleeps by Rob Plath w/ head turned upside-down curve of her closed eye a smile
it’s enough by Rob Plath the cat’s napping in an empty brown grocery sack & i’m half in the goddam bag so to speak sitting in my chair my amber glass
beside the busted buddha
statue on the crooked
little thrift store table & it’s enough to just look at the pub lights shining on rainy
pavement across the way & listen to
car tires turning on wet
streets slow peeling
sounds like peace
hatching out of its shell
crowbars
& middle fingers by Rob Plath the morning after the poetry reading i walked out hungover in the august sun stumbling thru the crowd at an intersection
i
accidentally kicked over a homeless woman’s change cup i had nothing on
me to give i
said sorry it’s
okay she said then she told me that my zipper was down
i
looked down & she was right so i zipped up & kept walking down the noisy
avenue then
two guys sitting against a brick wall said, fuck you, motherfucker & i glared at
them then
one said, it’s on yr shirt & i looked down & it did say
that w/a big middle finger in the center & i laughed & they laughed
& i kept walking the sun growing hotter its long arms like bright
crowbars against my skull & what was left of my soul
Contrary
to popular belief, Rob Plath is not yet under the jurisdiction of the
worms. His latest book of poems, Batter the Keyboard Like a Raptor Is Behind Yr Back,
is available from Laughing Ronin Press.
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