city cat turned country cat
lives out of boxes

dreams of missing things

oh my goodness oh my my
the lady in waiting to find a home

‘the dark ages are ahead’ says her neighbour

her younger selves
sit on shelves

she dreams she’s a cow
her feet caught on the windowsill

but in good we trust
we open our joyful windows

“nineteen vancouver city councillors slept outside covenant house
to raise awareness for the homeless”

in her group home on main street
her autistic sister asks too many questions

they gave her valium
when she takes it zero to hero

disappears reappears
the other housemates no longer disturb her

she becomes
herself

the queen of take it easy
on the road to freedom

an ordinary story stored in the body

there’s a frog on her porch
sing frog sing your rain song

call the water of the skies
bring the sky into her heart

her hot water tank does a jingle bell knell

marylee tells her that in thailand a monkey was hit by a car
his monkey mate picked him up & carried him away

the ghost on the coast painter who painted her haus
fucked off with the dough paint peeling on the ceiling

dad says when the sun comes out on the coast
they all go fishing

he asks me if i miss teaching

i ask him “did people say your eyes are like aunty flo’s?
“yes “ he says “i didn’t like that.”

her aunty is down from fifty mg of prednisone to five
aunty injects herself

when city cat stole the thesaurus out of the Windsor High School library
she was preparing to be a writer
but she got the blues

no one bought the books she wrote
no one bought the cds she made

she suspects the eastlink tech stole her eagle feather
with the help of the flying monkeys
& the negative high frequency
interdimensional beings

city mouse has turned country mouse in mein haus

(no animals were hurt during the making of this doggerel
however fb messenger interrupted the writing of it forty three times)

Don’t miss this Thurs. Aug. 10 from 12-1p. where cat mac & andrew kelly will serenade you with some originals & covers. cat’ll also read from her new book ‘emily & elspeth‘ at the Gibsons Public Market to kick off the Sunshine Coast Art & Words Festival!!

Ella closes up the fishbowl. she thinks about her sister. “if her sister’s things are gone, she’ll die.” she cocks her thirty-seven pound head. thinks about the element she left on tonite. how could she do that? she lost her car yesterday. left it at the bank. how could she do that? last night she dreamt she was swimming. the jellyfish of her dream did not appear & today, she swam. how did she know she would? at Armours Beach, she couldn’t breathe. she couldn’t let her stomach out in public. she ran to the can. breathed deeply for a few minutes. though

this morning she wants to hear “good men through the ages, tryin’ to find the sun.” she pops into her van. guess what’s playing? she thinks about those electrical shocks in her neck that come while sleeping, clenching her mouthguard or while reading outside, holding on to Elliot Page’s memoir.

& at the Swingle clinic. Dr. Hinglebottom spoke so tenderly. perhaps the silver lining of the pain in her neck is receiving the love she so rarely feels. maybe it isn’t 5G after all? just another algia. neur. algia. maybe the mercury is leaking out of her fillings. anything’s possible. remember driving through the town of Mercury in Nevada? not a soul in sight. all the houses boarded up. & that lone girl sobbing in the bathroom the day after the shooting at the concert in Las Vegas.

now they’ve put her friend on a dementia drug. her uncle on prednizone. they want her on gabapentin or carbamapazine when hypericum for ten dollars is giving her her life back. her sister doesn’t want her to go all half corked on her again. her mother can’t hear about her new friend Liz. “i ‘ve never heard that name before.” it’s a good thing Ned’s six year old daughter Tory hugged her so tightly this week. for five whole minutes. then she dreamt she was hugging a baby elephant.

fly by night moths, cats, earwigs in the fishbowl. always the neighbours, two floors up oggle. they want someone living above her. in the claustrophobic space. she went up a ladder through a squishy hole to the roof to a crawl-like space. they wanted her to live there, right there where that girl was suntanning. she has been looking for a home for three months.

heart breath of the world on her wall. the breath of god. a carmine river in her mind. desire for no reason. no one is putting that out. there’s a cougar on the bike path in Roberts Creek. a coyote sniffing out Lavender, her cat in the front yard. poor little four lettered forlorn four legged.

they killed two hundred bears in 2022 in BC. she has her bear bell. her bear spray. her neighbour calls their bear Leroy Brown. & there’s a cub in the poplar outside her backyard, right now. but the bushes have stopped crackling. the border patrol confiscated her pepper spray. she’s flagged by ties & equities. she had to prove she didn’t want to live in the states (but she did) so she got Nexus and got to use it once, then the pandemic came. and a tree fell and killed her friend Kathy Nemis recently.

she heard that there have been three hundred & fifty-five mass shootings in the states this year since Christmas. Joni Mitchell & Brandi Carlile have been flying through Princess Louisa Inlet, catching the day’s last rays. the Canadian dream, it’s a fiction.