I was born in a hospital. I stank.
They washed me. Five years later
my brain was a lightbulb that flickered on and off,
my soul was a milk bottle yearning to be full,
my stomach, made of concrete, had a long wooden table
where six dressed kittens sat, holding up their bowls.
Now my stomach has the pizzazz of a hundred colored bulbs
hanging by a wire over a cantina where someone in a white sheet
is learning to pour wine on the altar.
The cats have grown, scattered, multiplied
in my brain, where they fight over milk spilt
from the bottle, described now as an odalisque,
their cat hair standing on end.
And my soul is the concrete room
with an unstable card table where no one plays and nothing feeds,
though when I die there’s always the chance
someone with nice hands will wash me.