cat, unburied

by Cheryl A. Ossola

My dog found a dead cat by the side of the road,

flattened into the dirt yet strangely animate 

as if, hunting a bird or searching for sun

between ancient oaks that sentry the street, 

it stopped and fell over. 

A young cat from the looks of it, 

probably thinking itself a stalking lion,

struck down midstride yet unmarked: 

legs extended, gaze forward, skull intact.

I wanted to comfort this young hunter in its oblivion, 

stroke its cold-mudded coat, bury it among the tree roots

in the ground too hard to dig.

Four days later I am still thinking of this dead cat 

and of the people I love who are gone years now,

and of the five beloveds stolen from my friends last year,

and I begin to believe that if I bury the cat (if it’s not too late)

—if, in other words, I remove the evidence—

I can go back in time.

Don’t tell me someone took the small corpse away or tossed it aside, 

because when I leave the spot where the cat had been, 

climb stone steps to a medieval arch near a whispering church,

time spirals backward (eight hundred years at least, incomprehensible), 

and I walk lion-silent in search of warm grass, a foraging bird, 

inarguable proof of life.

Cheryl A. Ossola’s poetry and prose have appeared in After the Pause, Fourteen Hills, Switchback, Writers Digest, Dance Magazine, and the anthology Speak and Speak Again, among other publications. Her debut novel, The Wild Impossibility (Regal House Publishing), won a Nautilus Prize in Fiction. She lives and writes in Italy.