It is true that you may never look at a tree
the same way again after buying
a cheap chainsaw and spending more
weekends than you could imagine
hauling green brush to the dump
as you try to make your backyard
a clearing post-thirty years
of the people who lived here
doing little to the yard but mowing
the fence line filling in with growing saplings.
You’ll visit the waste grounds so many times
you end up bringing home
a stray tortoise-shell kitten
the workers are convinced someone let go
there on purpose, and you’ll drop her
before a low and narrow window
in your home where the small razors
on her feet claw against the glass
like she’s shoveling snow.
But after an initial discovery
and investigation into the existence
of glass panes, she won’t do anything
for two days but sleep. And once
she knows she’s home for good
and rested up, she’ll skip for hours
across the hardwood of the living room
with gouges and scrapes from the last
owners so deep you wonder
what they were trying
to pull. The kitten, of course,
will puncture the entire side of the couch,
seemingly systematically, the couch
you got from neighbors across the street
the day you moved in
and they were moving out,
but the kitten will be, of course,
decidedly uninterested in your shelves
of inordinately prized books,
one of the reasons you think big readers
tend to be cat people,
though she will find your saxophone curious
the moment it makes a sound
in the small bedroom of your house,
built in 1922 with its funky layout:
six rooms, two front doors.
Your kitten, deemed “indoor only,”
will beg to go outside—one night,
she escapes and you, crying,
call your partner who’s, of course, away
for a few days, until you realize
the kitten is terrified. She won’t leave
the back steps until you scrape her out
from underneath that three-tiered platform,
crooked, bowing, begging to be replaced.
All summer, you continue visiting the dump
with literal tons of brush,
once filling the cotton hamper of your t-shirt
and returning with peaches from loose limbs
on the fresh top of the pile. At home,
you’ll lay the stone fruits in a clear Pyrex dish
you scored from a dumpster back in Florida.
When the fruits smell soft, you’ll make
an ugly, edible pie that you devour
with ice cream and a bamboo spoon
as you watch the kitten prowl
a collapsible cardboard house
on your living room floor
and wonder how anyone could give
away something so sure
and so sweet.
Freesia McKee (she/her) writes about history and place. She practices poetry, creative prose, book reviews, and literary criticism. Freesia served as the Fall 2022 Poet in Residence at Ripon College. In 2023, she will begin working as an Assistant Professor of English at UW-Stevens Point. Read more at FreesiaMcKee.com.