Sentient Creatures
{A Bumbershoot Special Feature}



Mollycat Jones

lives with her human companions, Christine and Ken Potter, and her brother, Desmond, in an old house that sometimes has mice. She almost caught a goldfinch once, but her brother got it instead. And Ken took it away from him, anyway. It flew off. A strict formalist, Molly believes that Christine’s book, Zero Degrees At First Light, would be OK if it had more metrical poetry in it. This is her second appearance in Bumbershoot.


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Mollycat’s Nocturne

I wake the Big Ones in the night
with half-dead mice—or just for spite.
The Big Ones waste too long in sleep
at once. They snore. I don’t. I keep
my cat-naps short and still. How trite,

the way they gargle ’til it’s light
unless I give them just a slight
paw-poke. There’s no need to bite.
I use one claw—

extended, sharpened. What delight
to prick a cheek or nose just right
and rouse them from the dreaming, deep
enormous, snorting human heap
they’ve curled into. It takes no might.
I use one claw.



 
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