Consolations of Bast by Mary A. Turzillo

Consolations of Bast
by
Mary A. Turzillo


She shivers:
alone in her huge crib,
longing for sleep if she knew what it was.
They
have left her forever.
She wails and the night grinds on,
until the cat comes,
purrs her to sleep.

Heavy
in her arms is
the cat,
perhaps a different cat.
Tears
fall on its indifferent head.
She sobs:
stone-hearted boy!
It purrs.
The hum makes her lose
the thread of her grief

Her baby screams
with fever;
and so many bills due.
She lies waiting for
dawn and catastrophe.
Please, please,
just let me sleep. So
the cat kneads her chest
and she sinks
into revery.

The dying
feel warmth,
heavy as a baby, on their chests.
Someone
has left open
the door to the
Home
and the cat,
a different cat surely,
holds down
the old woman's sorrow
its rasp
licking away
only bad memories.

And in the open coffin,
the mortician's cat
keeps the dead company,
half asleep,
purring:
she does not
go alone.

Cat-O-Matic by Joel Clark

Cat-O-Matic
by Joel Clark

My Cat-O-Matic electronic cat language translator arrived in the mail! I plugged it in and said, “Testing! Testing!” into the microphone and the little speaker made a “Meoooawwoo, meoawooo” catlike sound.

Fluffy jumped up from her nap and scanned the room. She leaped on the couch back and looked behind it.

“Hello, Fluffy, it’s me talking!” I said.

“Hey, Dingbat, are you talking to me??” she answered.

“Yes, Fluffy! Isn’t it great, now we can have a little cat chat!” I said.

“Please, Dilbert, my name isn’t Fluffy. To you, it’s ‘Your Royal Highness Queen Cleopatra II’,” she corrected me.

“I’m excited, Fluffy, I mean Cleo, now you’ll understand me and you can come when I call you.”

“Dream on, Buster Brown,” said Cleo. She got comfortable to continue her nap.

“Wait, don’t you want to talk any more? This is a communication breakthrough for man and the animal kingdom; you can be one of the first cats to be understood! You can tell me what it’s like to be a cat.”

“It’s very boring,” said Cleo in a bored voice.

“Do you want to know about me, your owner, where I grew up and where I went to school, and my career…?”

“No.” Cleo napped on.

“Cleo, now you’ll be able to make special cat food requests.”

Cleo napped on.

“Cleo, I can read interesting things to you. See this magazine ‘Cat Fancier’? See…pictures of cats…ads for cat toys!”

Cleo opened one eye. “What’s a cat toy?” she asked.

I held the magazine close to Cleo. I pointed to numerous catnip mice and little jiggly fluffy mice on strings, jingle balls, and wind-up chipmunks.

“I’d like one of those and one of those and that cat scratching post with all the cubbyholes,” she allowed. “What are those?” she asked as she pointed with her paw at some cat books.

“Books, see, I have some around the house here, let me show you.”

I read her The Cat in the Hat. She laughed some little cat laughs and said, “Pretty funny, Dingleberry. Read me another one.”

I read some more. “Well, I’ve read five books, aren’t you tired?”

“I want those cat toys!” said Queen Cleopatra II.

We went to the store to buy cat toys.

After that, we went to the library to get more cat books to read. I read 20 cat books.

“Cleo, I’m tired now, don’t you want to take a nap now?”

“Let’s go, Kokomo, keep reading!”

I read 20 more cat books. Cleo decided she wanted to write a cat story, just like the book stories.

I got pencil and paper and wrote what she dictated.

“This is good, McGee, but can’t you draw the pictures, too, like in The Cat in the Hat?”

I illustrated her cat story. (Interesting plot…a cat chased a mouse. And then chased another mouse.)

“I feel I could be a successful author. I want to write a whole series, starring my principal character, the mysterious and beautiful ‘Queenie The Magnificent’,” Cleo said enthusiastically.

For some reason the Cat-O-Matic suddenly stopped working (because I pulled the plug). I said words but no cat sounds came out.

I looked at Cleo. She looked at me and said “Meeughe meeeeoooww muge meeeeoooww? Muee meeeeoooww muee meeeeoooww?”

I shrugged with upturned hands. I carefully filled out the return merchandise form, including under Remarks: “Please refund my money as per your ‘Money back guarantee if not satisfied.’” I boxed up the machine. Then I settled down for a nap.

Blood Brothers by Lynda Nash

Blood Brothers
by Lynda Nash

The cats are in the garden.
Playing,
They jump at flowers,
Roll in dirt.

One kills a bird.
In turns they bite,
The taste of blood makes them frenzied.
Faces ecstatic
They gambol in the grass like spring lambs.

The road claimed Elwood.
(Grass in the garden was not enough.)
Creeping illness took Jake; his kidneys failed.

Among the flowers,
Trapped by the dirt.
As free as birds.
Jake and Elwood, the cats,
Are in the garden.

Ode to a Nameless Cat by Celestine Trinidad

Ode to a Nameless Cat
by Celestine Trinidad

We thought it best not to give him a name,
So little,
So vulnerable.
Death could easily take him away,
Invisible to a distracted driver,
Victim to a fatal disease.
We thought it best not to love him,
not yet.
Not when we lost so many little ones before.

But it was inevitable.
He was never afraid,
not of us.
He would lick our calloused hands,
Snuggle against our bone-weary feet,
Rest his little head on our laps,
a silent solace.

We loved him,
Yet still we did not name him.

But it was inevitable.
One day, death, with its icy hands,
Wrenched him away from our warmth
into its frozen embrace.
And we have no name to remember him by.

Yet we mourn for the little orange kitten
we never thought to name,
Yet still
loved.


Celestine Trinidad is an intern of Medicine from the Philippines, but she still tries to read and write as much as she can in her (now unfortunately very little) free time. Much to her surprise, she won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature for her short story for children “The Storyteller and the Giant”. Her blog can be found here.

Fernando by Steve Toase

Fernando
by Steve Toase

Fernando the cat had a paintbrush for a tail. While he slept by the fire of an evening his tail would produce maps of great beauty. Upon waking Fernando would regard them with a disdain usually only reserved for rodents and minor members of the royal family. A cat has no need for maps, even ones as elegant as these, that could lead the unwary traveler to lands that exist only in mists and stories.

Cats already know the routes to these places, through alleys and over bramble-covered bricks.

It is possible to acquire one of these documents. Purchase is not quite correct. No currency will be exchanged, but a price will be extracted, and there are conditions. You must find the shop where a man with a grey mustache and a red beard waits behind a solid oaken desk. While there you can only communicate in gestures, and only one map may be purchased in any one lifetime. How do you find the shop? Well, its location is only known through a map Fernando painted while billeted with the International Brigades during the siege of Madrid. Or you could try following a cat, through the alleys, and over the bramble covered bricks.

Visit Steve's Web site!

First-Feline Point of View by RD Hartwell

First-Feline Point of View
by RD Hartwell

I overheard someone say,
first-person is the true
method made to order,
putting one’s persona forward,
transmitting all related life
from one’s own point-of-view.

Well, I am not a person!
Don’t really want to be one,
I’m a cat, that’s felis catus,
and a good one for all that.

Kitten-written stories, myths,
memoirs, and self-biography,
should all have cat-perspective,
First-Feline POV!

I like the singsong sound,
such euphonic melody,
neo-literary label,
kitten-written totality.

Lest you think it’s easy
writing as a cat,
Let me disabuse you,
challenge you to those
obstacles to my fiction
purrr-fection with which
I daily have to deal.

There is the oft-presumed
handicap of not being
able to push pen or pencil;
but, new computer
methodology,
as one can plainly see,
creates a neat solution;
not a bone to pick
but a boon for me.

I used to meow-morize
creative contributions,
relating them aloud,
fables and folklore,
essays, lies, and more,
anecdotal aphorisms or
extended metaphor.

Now I am no longer limited,
to catalogues by word-of-mouth,
and by a memory taxed to break,
now given way to memory sticks.

All I ask from others now
is to be left alone to type.

fat cat by Jonathan Pinnock

fat cat
by Jonathan Pinnock


fat cat came up from the city

fat cat such a charming kitty

fat cat sits at our back door

fat cat always hungry for more



fat cat manky fat cat smelly

fat cat has a bloated belly

fat cat never says “enough”

fat cat feeling rather rough



fat cat starts to whine and wince

fat cat throws up over our chintz

fat cat does what he does best

fat cat repays us – with interest