Marina Hope Wilson

 
The Animal

I wake up thinking of the boy and the cat—
how his grandmother boiled a pot of water,
and he didn’t want to say so, but still remembered

all these years later, that she hated the cat
so she heated the water and poured it, scalding,
over its fur, and how it screamed.
 
Who boils the water, considers the steps,
does the awful thing?
 
The boy, he tries to blot it out. But still
he grows up and carries the cat with him.

He can’t for the life of him put it down.

The Carnivores

One cat drags in so many mice
I check under the table before sitting,
for fear of squishing my toes into
the guts of some freshly killed creature.

The other cat’s murders are limited to crane flies
and moths, and the plastic packaging she drags daily
from the waste basket, whining as she goes.
How I do love these soft bodied assassins.

Even as I scribble notes on empire and meat
and masculinity, even as I study the forms
of gentleness and its transformations,
I make this violence possible.

Every day, I send my wildness out.
Every day, I call my wildness back in.

And I am just one person.
 

Marina Hope Wilson is the author Nighttime (Cooper Dillon Books). Her poems have appeared in $, Bicoastal Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco and works as a speech-language therapist. website

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