*RE: "Cat People"*

The remains of last year's overgrown hedges and untended perennials
swept into the upper middle canal under unseasonably warm February and
my comings and goings.  Doña Natalia was on the porch today with the
oxygen tank a heavy shawl over a bright patchwork of cotton and calico.
"Every favorite nightgown I ever owned.  I went through them fast,"
she'd say and laugh a while and cough.  Morning.

Spearmint.

The cats wouldn't come to the door and mewled through the night.
Neighbors complained.  He knew they knew well enough to hop on any
pretext but for his Nana's sake he'd let them stay this long.

"Your Nana said you'd be here."

"The thing people don't appreciate about the inner groove is that like
all the others maybe the same needle cut it but it's going to sound
different on every table

"No matter how many times you heard your favorite record you take it to
a friends play it on another table wake up the next morning its the way
it skips periodically unfamiliar that tells you that that isn't your
needle, that this isn't your home.  I mean, sure, you feel the same way
when you wake up at home with the table still on but it's not the
needle.  You get what I'm sayin?"

I did not, but I wished I did because he'd hoped I would.  So I said, "I
know," trying my best to sound reluctantly half wistful.

Blues sitar on vinyl.

"Be splendid, not precious," he said, taking a sip of his cat poison.

Losing his composure, he added, "Be a fucking man, for fuck's sake."

I'd heard him play it so often I learned to listen for his breathing and
the pedal, different every time, like the first hints of a coming rain.
From his window, so seldom open, unused to letting in fresh air.

He was trying to get into couture nic juice.

From an early admirer, a neighbor of his mother's back home, he learned
to sit at a desk with labeled vials arrayed like tiered pipes of an
organ mixing counterfeit cologne.  They'd walk beyond the town to pick
savage fruit and herbs they'd take home.  They brewed tisanes that made
them sick and smelt so good and strong the neighbor girls dreamt of
love.

"Trust me, what nobody realizes yet they want is a coconut vape done
right.  Faintest hint of vanilla and spice."