The Moon That Night
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Having eaten your head clean off, my catdrops your plump carcass on the doormat.Between blood and purple clots, a bit of neck boneinsists on the air. I lean toward this sharpness,get right up to the vacant white nipple, like milkthat has contested its cream and been deemed "fat-free."
Transparent like a baby's fingernail,the broken column protects dead nerves.My cat licks her paw and smack! your pudgy massjumps, blood escaping into jute threads.
White like the full moon that night I was twelveand we snuck up the road. He opened his blue jeans andthrust his blunt eye at me. It was this or nothing,he said. I wish I'd chosen nothing. Later, the moonsplit the road with redwood trees and I relentedto my home. Exhausted, I didn't even swing my armsat the bat stealing moths above my head.
I didn't wake again until you, little mouseresting in the middle of "welcome," until my catin whose wide green eyes I see myselfleaning from the doorway, and I remember. [End Page 69]
Amber Flora Thomas, who teaches creative writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has received a number of honors for her poetry, including the Richard Peterson Prize and Ann Stanford Prize. Her first collection of poetry, Eye of Water, won the Cave Canem Prize and was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2005. Most recently her poetry has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Hunger Mountain, American Literary Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among other publications. She received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998.
