Two Poems

THE INDIVIDUAL CATS Superstore parking lot December 19^th Dartmouth and Mom looked like she was smoking but she wasn’t smoking. It was definitely scary to go to another country but in the new year she was going down to Cuba Town. She said it would be all nuts down there. She was so excited. Goats were like people’s cats down and and that’s what she likes. Real life. We had stopped to get clementines for Christmas and we were such tourists. It feels like we are living life, Mom looking through the fruit for the fruit cake it was all just sort of laughable like that. A do you remember the time thing. Year of the rabbit long drive to Musquodobit. My mom likes to keep clementines in the closet which would be so good in a poem if I liked to interior decorate. She was extremely tired of the snow angel in the front yard, all the nursing shifts. Maybe she would meet a man in Camaguey who would ask if she liked her diamonds in her ears. When you’re in a new place you have to make friends. I want to tell her that sometimes I hope my friend comes home and catches me singing to the cat songs about him being a baby cat. I don’t think she would get it. It is one of my artistic outlets and she is very sciencey. I had put on her bra once and she said you do not have breasts which was biologically correct. When I was born the apartment upstairs thought my mother had a Siamese cat that cried all night. Her favourite saying was born then. Get your head out of your ass. Her son wasn’t a cat so get your head out of the tabloids. Mother gives birth to creature who wear’s woman’s fashion. Once I had a friend who said that my fingernails were too long for a boy. How should a boy be? I haven’t shaved my back for two weeks. All this in the produce section with my mother in Dartmouth. We drove past all the relative houses and I curled up in the backseat with the clementines these fancy little oranges that my mother loved these little orange loves. I got home I unloaded everything out of the car. The tree was wearing too much jewelry more garland than Judy Garland. My mother is real strict about the tree and the decorating. I was five when I saw a tree talking in Mic Mac Mall his name was Woody the Talking Christmas Tree. He rolled his eyes open and asked how can I help you? Talking to guys gave me the nervous systems. He was so tall. I had put everything on the table and the clementines were bad. They were a weird color I wish I took a photo. Mom would take a return flight back to the store and return them to the place they came from. I really wanted to have a poem about me for once. When she went to bed I scratched and meowed at the door until she asked what are you, a cat? and in the morning when I admitted to my catness I circled in and out of her feet and she googled that it was not uncommon in the feline world for communication to vary amongst individual cats.   WHEELBARROW AND CABBAGE My grandfather used to lie about his profession. He said he was a school teacher, taught math to his pupils. When he took me to his garden he took attendance of what was there. There rows of pumpkin, a full plot of cauliflower and broccoli and one of cabbages so big he didn’t know how to move them. All his sons have moved on. When he was younger he used to put them in the wheelbarrow and push them up to the house at night. Grandad he would walk down the aisles of cabbages counting the heads. This year he had too many of them. He said if he didn’t pick them before September they would turn into children. I didn’t need any more brothers and sisters and I didn’t want to take a cabbage to school and say, yes, it’s weird but he’s actually my uncle. My grandfather took a knife to the underside of them and lifted them into his wheelbarrow which would only six and me comfortably. I liked riding with my family and when we got to the house he would pretend he didn’t know which one was me. He would put me on the table with the vegetables and I would try and convince him that he did not grow me. I was not a cabbage, I thought I was a boy or at least tomato. Half vegetable half fruit.