BY KAI COGGIN
SHADOW
(for Felis catus)
We have been feeding him for three years now—a black feral cat with jade eyes and golden irises and long wizard whiskers, who we’ve affectionately named Shadow. First she appeared as a mirage, a puff of smoke moving quickly through the forest on the other side of the backyard pond, a trick of the eye, a hallucination. Never a bad omen, a superstition, or a witch’s sidekick, unless you think of us as witches—in that case, I have another poem to write entirely. For years, Shadow lingered on the property peacefully. Sure, there were a few chased birds, caught birds, feathers strewn across wet grass, but most days she would sit and stare at us from a hundred yards out, silent watcher, wondering about us, watching the dance of our lives. He crept close and closer as the months moved into years. She would sleep on the huge stump of the tree we fell in the garden, sun rising on her round body curled on her grand wooden throne, black fur rusting in morning light. I’d coo through the window. Reader, I know you notice the pronouns switching from he to she, but we have never gotten close to enough to really tell if Shadow is a boy or a girl. They are just Shadow, non-binary cat, untouchable, a flash. Three years of this gender ambiguity. Three years of detachment, but still loving. Three years of feeding in the morning and evening. Three years of I guess Shadow is our cat now, though sometimes we do notice he saunters over from the neighbor’s with a fat full belly. No judgment here. Get your kicks, cat. Take what the world is serving, wild one. Three years of psssss psssss psssss psssss and hitting a fork to the little ceramic plate we leave on the deck for her. Shadow runs up from under the house, from one of his hiding spaces, or from the cush luxury cabana that my wife built so he could survive winters outside. He meows and gets almost close enough to touch, but still aloof, jumpy, won’t allow a single hair to be stroked, scurries, backs away until we are a safe distance. I know he’d like to be loved, would enjoy a cuddle or belly rub, would see that our calves and ankles are great to rub against, but there is always that unbreakable wild he holds onto, the feral that’s helped him stay alive. Just because you have never touched something, it can still be proclaimed beloved, it can still fall into dependent. We still add her kitty kibble and canned delicacies to the groceries each week. We aren’t really cat people. You know of the loyalty we have to our dogs, and yes, Layla gives Shadow a run for his money around the garden, black dog chasing black cat, mirrors running from their reflections. But let’s go ahead and make this official. Reader, we have a cat—a feral black beautiful sleek creature who lounges on our deck in summer’s long afternoons, who sits on our porch at dusk by the big red pot that holds the coral honeysuckle vines, and delights for hours in watching the hummingbirds dip and whirr in her sightline, bouncing from bloom to bloom. She doesn’t jump or lunge toward them with fangs gleaming, just sits in stillness, head turning with curious angles of appreciation. Our Shadow—fed and sleepy and home.
Psssss psssss psssss psssss.
IT’S NOT THAT I CAN’T HAVE CHILDREN
It’s not that I can’t have children
that my body is not a house—
it’s just that my life
never had the chance to make room,
did not open in a way to make itself a womb,
the timing of years between my lover and mine,
the age of different periods of mothering
inclining and declining at the same time,
there just was never the solid enough ground of
myself or the chance even,
a man
was not in the cards
and I never even played from that deck,
so it never really became
a possibility,
and I am almost at the apex of this want,
this deep yearning to hold a child of my own flesh and bone,
to make my body a home—
but perhaps that proverbial ship has sailed,
and the life that I have created
is the life I have the life I love.
Perhaps my womb has turned outwards
somehow, and my heart is fertility itself.
Perhaps I have always been a mother
without a human child,
searching for my children in the trees,
in the understory of ancient forests,
hidden under smooth stones,
in warm fur-covered bodies,
in wing tuft and claw,
in the exoskeletons of nymphs,
phylums that lack a sort of mothering I can
give, and so I tend to the wild ones,
I mother other kingdoms,
rock every other species to sleep—
the green and howl and pulse and bloom.
It’s not that I can’t have children,
it’s that I already do.