Bright Stain by Francesca Bell

Author:Francesca Bell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2019-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

the baby is at full cry,

its wide-open wailing

like a kettle at hard boil,

over-roiling, at scream.

The sound is a pulled trigger,

spraying milk everywhere.

The duvet will sour.

My shirt, stain.

In this circuit, I’m neither detonator

nor what absorbs the charge.

I’m the casing left behind,

the part blown empty.

When I Think About Cats

I think about that Spokane basement,

how the cats went nuts

shitting all over the concrete floor.

I was sent down to clean it.

Some of it came right up, tidy handfuls

of shit, but some was diarrhea

dried hard, so I had to slop puddles

of hot water and bleach

on those spots and wait,

nostrils stinging, for the mess

to soften. That was the year

I turned twelve, when my family’s boozy

heritage arrived in burning-tongued

waves on our shores.

So when I see in The Atlantic,

these years later, that T. gondii,

cat shit parasite, can lodge

in a rat’s brain or a person’s

and make them crazy,

I flash back to bleach, liquor, vomit,

all the stains that refuse

to budge. I know metaphor lurks

here: how the parasite can live

in rats but has to get back

into the belly of a cat

to reproduce, how it highjacks

the brain’s circuits until

rats are aroused by cat urine,

find themselves milling around

in the open like women

who walk bad neighborhoods

after dark, and those male rats

lucky enough to get lucky,

infect the rat mamas,

and 60% of their pups are born

yearning for what will kill them.

Still, I find myself wanting bleary men

better passed with my head down.

I don’t want to know

who I am in this metaphor—

cat, rat, parasite—and who

the men may be, lined up like bottles

in a liquor store, mesmerizing—

their breathalyzer-blowing kisses,

their bodies straining to enter my body,

their fluids to make it past

the gates at my very center,

my DNA waiting

with its thirst like a hole

and the edge of that hole a cliff

I look down from always,

where my wildness bubbles up

like the fizz of fermentation

or water that’s too hot

to hold still.

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