Cats

Do you subscribe to the Paris Review 

daily poetry newsletter?

It’s one of the good ones. Maybe the best.

I like to fall behind for a week or two

so I can catch up all at once.

Like this morning. Lucy Grealy 

had a good one. “Ward 10.” A hospital

where the speaker is treated I think

for cancer, as a kid. An image of going

down into the basement to find the “cages

and cages of cats, most of them silent, some

with electrodes sewn in their heads.”

This--by coincidence--right after

I'd read Lizzie Hessek's poem

on a similar set of themes: being trapped

inside, losing friends, and how

we reach the point where we can kill

whatever compunction might have kept us

from being cruel to the same soft things

who teach us that maybe there's a reason

to keep being after all