My kitten takes me everywhere I need to go
When I am sunk her ears remind me
of lightness and rightness and treats,
they are paper cones for sweets, chips or popcorn,
except these are upside down
and miniaturised and made of ultra-thin flickable tissue
spread with veins, oh so delicate and terrifyingly
easy to tear, filled with fur to protect
their hidden miniature cavity which is like the interior
of a snail shell, shadowed and cool,
like a chamber in my heart if it could ever be empty,
if all that fluid could fall silent and still.
Washing herself busily her leg points high
like a burlesque dancer,
she is risqué, daring, supremely uninterested in you.
Her foot is padded like a real grown-up cat
but this is just pretend, impossibly small.
Quick! Nothing this tiny lasts for long. She will grow,
or puff out of existence when she realises she isn’t real.
Her tail with a hard bone in the centre
like one of those plastic toy snakes, joint fixed to joint
so it curls but only to the connection’s limits—
her tail knows when to stop.
Fuzzy and fluffed up, her hairs are so close the roots
can’t be seen through, most of her body
is a secret I will never discover,
but above her eyes
she has negative eyebrows where the hair is thinner
so the skin can be seen underneath.
It is whitish grey— each sparse hair is picked
out like trees after a fire, in an ashen floor, soon
after the fire so the ground is still warm, I can feel it
through the soles of my feet, the tips of my fingers
as I hold her while she sleeps.
Oh look, amid all this ash there are
green shoots once more, a tail twitches, she stretches,
a paw bats my fingers
and now there she goes,
she leaps.
Caroline Stancer completed the MA Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. She wrote Full Body Reclaim on Writing East Midlands’ Mentoring Scheme with Helen Mort, was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition 2021 and commended in Verve Festival Competition 2023.