Presage
Lauren Gordon
Oscar the cat sniffs out death
in a Rhode Island nursing home and thinks:
life is a confluence of shambling
but not really, he’s just a cat
with a pinked nose and paw, a light-stepping
biting-ball of a good way to know your end.
Now see the eternal hummingbird, Jimmy,
who flits the window as his parents paint
his bedroom. It’s been fifteen years
since a two by four sticking out of a truck
struck him dead, but he still makes time to visit.
At a Home Depot in Pasadena,
a man finds a shelf full of drywall saws
and cleaves both his arms until he is a puddle
of breathing blood and a permanent memory:
He was tired of living as a sand crane.
This is presage: Animals know when they are needed.
You have to imagine the dog’s leg on a spit
as the calf muscle stops hugging the ankle,
shrinks back on the bone before tearing:
Jerked meat for my squalling toddler
and her emaciated brother —
It can’t always be hummingbirds;
sometimes you submit.
My Fighting Beta never did a damn thing
when I walked next to death —
Or did he paddle contrarily,
bubble like a pipe, sing like a green canary
in the darkness where I slept?
in a Rhode Island nursing home and thinks:
life is a confluence of shambling
but not really, he’s just a cat
with a pinked nose and paw, a light-stepping
biting-ball of a good way to know your end.
Now see the eternal hummingbird, Jimmy,
who flits the window as his parents paint
his bedroom. It’s been fifteen years
since a two by four sticking out of a truck
struck him dead, but he still makes time to visit.
At a Home Depot in Pasadena,
a man finds a shelf full of drywall saws
and cleaves both his arms until he is a puddle
of breathing blood and a permanent memory:
He was tired of living as a sand crane.
This is presage: Animals know when they are needed.
You have to imagine the dog’s leg on a spit
as the calf muscle stops hugging the ankle,
shrinks back on the bone before tearing:
Jerked meat for my squalling toddler
and her emaciated brother —
It can’t always be hummingbirds;
sometimes you submit.
My Fighting Beta never did a damn thing
when I walked next to death —
Or did he paddle contrarily,
bubble like a pipe, sing like a green canary
in the darkness where I slept?
Listen to Lauren read the poem here:
Working notes
“Presage” was written as a quilt of reckoning; how I struggled to understand the interconnectivity of humanity through grief, how we are animals and how that idea saves me from being swallowed by grief – purpose through loss.
Oscar is a therapy cat who garnered national attention by predicting the impending deaths of terminally ill patients. Jimmy was killed when he was fourteen years old. The Home Depot where a man sawed both of his arms was actually in West Covina. My life was spared during the Northridge earthquake when the brick chimney I slept next to collapsed in the direction opposite of my bedroom.
Oscar is a therapy cat who garnered national attention by predicting the impending deaths of terminally ill patients. Jimmy was killed when he was fourteen years old. The Home Depot where a man sawed both of his arms was actually in West Covina. My life was spared during the Northridge earthquake when the brick chimney I slept next to collapsed in the direction opposite of my bedroom.
About the author
Lauren Gordon received her MFA in Poetry from New England College and her BA in English from the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming with Poetry International, Whole Beast Lit Mag, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Sugared Water, Poetry Crush, and has been anthologized in “Knocking at the Door” with Write Bloody Publishing, 2011. Lauren is a Contributing Editor to Radius Lit and lives outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin with her husband and daughter.