The Somersaulting Cat
Photo: Angel Santos on Unsplash
‘And watching me- / hacking the fruits of / the subconscious / from the tedious branches / of unexposed reality.’
The cat across the street,
rolled up in the yellow brisk agony;
smelling of naphthalene balls;
whimpered to call the
Imperial god, who was resting
behind the mountains of
soot black clay.
Sipping the lemonade,
in a thrush of social anxiety,
peeping through the curtains of
subsiding Guilt,
And watching me—
hacking the fruits of
the subconscious
from the tedious branches
of unexposed reality.
The next morning,
I woke up with coagulated sorrow,
and a trail of familiar breaths on my
doorstep—finding
a tumbler of rejoiced milk;
and newspapers,
screaming the psychedelic lies
in the columns of
everyday’s horoscope.
I wonder whether the animals, birds, insects—
turn to the stars
for karma, for fate.
I saw the cat again,
by the generous curb of the isolated street;
Doing somersaults,
and licking the milky seeds of my garden.
I left to brew coffee and
mull over the
Fate of Katherine O’Hara;
to gauge her beauty and,
Her tragedy
Against the yardstick of poetic justice.
My nostrils flamed with
a haggard ecstasy
on reading the last line—
“After all tomorrow is another day”.
Yes tomorrow might be an
Another day.
For me, for Katherine,
For the solitary cat.
And she might somersault in the
Incessant cycle of yellow agony and
Milky ecstasy.
***
Sanskriti K is a post-graduate Literature student from The English and Foreign Languages University. Her poems have been published in YuGen magazine and several poetry anthologies including Poetica (Volume 2). She has also written short stories which have been included in The Inspiration Collective. Her works on “Magic Realism as a Narrative strategy: A study of Marquez, Rushdie and Morrison” under CPE Scheme (UGC) along with “A Discussion on Re-exoticization and Neo-Colonialism in India through Visual Texts” have been published in national journals. She is on Instagram: @_mrs_dalloway.
