Catherine Rockwood

For Abandoned Pets

—After A.E. Stallings

Did someone rescue what we couldn’t?
The rabbit left in the courtyard in D.C.,
two orange yearling cats I numbly drove
to a shelter in Branford, or Milford.
Anywhere on the Post Road.

It fixes nothing: us, abandoned too
in our own way by parents over-young
and under-taught, never meaning to hurt
but horrified by life, dropped in their hands
to raise.  So we could barely find a room
within ourselves, sister, each year since birth.

But didn’t we at last unerringly
together reach and, through the cold, lift out
of her small berth over the restaurant
her desperate howls disturbed, this gangly hound
now sleeping by my feet?
                                            Have we learned
how to love a fearsome high-ribbed creature
running after trust that flees from her?

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Catherine Rockwood is a former academic and martial artist, a current literary magpie and walker in the woods. She lives in Massachusetts with her family. Her poems appear in Reckoning Magazine, SWWIM, Rogue Agent Journal, Moist Poetry Journal, Contrary Magazine and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion, is forthcoming from the Ethel Zine Press in 2022.