You’re watching me again—
perched on the broken fence,
ribs counting themselves beneath your skin.
A breath of fur and bone,
barely there,
just enough to stir the air.
Shadow of an alley,
printless,
as if the world erases you
before you’ve passed through it.
I wonder if you knew your mother.
Did she vanish
without the sound of leaving—
no gap,
just the slow theft
of something unnamed?
I was assigned parents:
a man, a woman.
They answered to mother, to father.
Their voices frayed like old wire,
half-caught in static.
They spoke,
but never to me.
Turned,
when I entered—
as if I were wind
someone forgot to shut the window against.
I watch you fold yourself into dusk,
an afterthought
in motion.
You don’t ask where you belong.
You don’t fumble for names.
You don’t wait at an empty plate,
hoping for something
other than silence.
I envy you, cat—
your raw-boned solitude,
your refusal
to be known.
But tell me—
when night stretches its jaw,
and your ribs ache like a second hunger,
do you wish
for a voice
to say your name?
Or have you already learned
what I fear most—
that freedom, too, has teeth,
and the price of belonging
is the only thing
keeping you
from disappearing.