The Street Cat
I met a cat on the street today.
She was a long-haired tortoiseshell cat
(which she insisted was wrong
as tortoises were nothing like her
for they have no hair at all?!).
So, I asked her,
“What’d you rather I call you?”
and she pondered for a moment.
Pink and black toe pads rose
from the sidewalk and scratched
at the sooted daub on her nose.
“I cannot say what for sure.”
She continued,
“What do you think would be fitting?”
I watched her spin in slow circles,
her apricot eyes’ black pits expand,
looking up and down at her mottled
splodges of sun and shadow fur.
“Maybe you’re a dusk-smudged cat?”
Her head tilted, asking for elaboration.
“Well, I guess cause your fur
is painted all dusk-ish.
And looking like the sky and the clouds
after the sun disappears, I mean.”
“I do like that—very much, in fact,”
she added after a moment of consideration.
Then, she kept slinking down the sidewalk
and brushed her oil-painted-horizon
against the pant leg of my dirty blue jeans.
Wrendolyn Klotzko is a poet studying education, creative writing, and English at SUNY Oswego. She is from the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. She has been published by The Great Lake Review, Gandy Dancer, BarBar, and the Nature State of Mind anthology. Wrendolyn is currently the head poetry editor of the Great Lake Review, and after graduation she aspires to teach poetry at the collegiate level and get a cat.