M.A. Schaffner
Natural Woman
Thanks to her neighbor's cats she knows
various scents of death: the fruity ripeness
of a torn and swollen possum;
the musk of an exposed and battered mole;
the sudden perfume of maggots spawned
in the husk of a jay's electric feathers.
A pigeon killed by hawks will have no smell,
only a clean rib cage and a pair of wings,
the remnant of a calculated need.
She tried to talk it out a few years back
after the video-taped birth of Neighbor's
fourth hormone-induced child, the one that sat
in a stroller till it was five, the one
with crooked eyes.
Neighbor used her schoolmarm voice:
It's nature, it said.
It's not nature, she replied, it's you.
Nature never breeds
predators in such abundance,
fed well enough to wait
like land mines when the war is over.
Which settled nothing, of course. So she learned
one can't win by challenging illusions,
but decided that, if cats are Nature,
then she can be Nature, too.
And the functional equivalent of a Nine Lives can
is a high-powered slingshot, and a sport
that she calls: Eight Lives Down,
and Counting.
Page(s) 93
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