This Much Is Mine

She appears at the gate
to my apartment building
one night. Round
yellow eyes glinting
in the streetlight,
two little lanterns
of curiosity and longing.
She slides her tiny body
along the bars of the gate
and I kneel down
reach out my hand
and she meets it
with the top of her head
closes her eyes
and begins to purr.

Another night
I round the corner
and she comes
mewling sweetly
up the street. We sit
together on the stoop
and I stroke her gray
and white vibrating neck,
and she falls asleep in my lap.
Listen
to the steady magic motor
in her throat.

I bring her upstairs
and she sniffs every
corner and crevice and surface
and then she hops
up on the bed
and kneads my belly
and closes her eyes and when
she slowly opens them again
through the narrow
slits they glow
mine, mine, mine.

She drinks from her blue bowl
in the kitchen. She spreads
a forepaw to lick
the crevices between
all five toes
and all around them,
then places it on the floor
and lifts the other paw.
From the back the chair
she licks the top
of my head as I read.
Her whiskers twitch with dreams.
It snows a thick
layer on the fire escape
she dips her paw in it
then shakes it wildly,
the cold white fluff flying.
She is lit from inside.

My breakfast crumbs fall
and she puts her nose
to the floor to inspect them,
her tiny head dipping down
and up and down.

She wreathes her body
in circles around my shins,
and then she runs
to the bed
and rolls around
in the pile of freshly
laundered towels.
When I stroke her
she is electric
and the sound she makes is electric
as she stretches and contracts.
She grows fatter every day
and sleeps wrapped
tightly around herself.
She sits in the sun
on the windowsill
watches the leaves
blow around below.
She chatters
re eh et et eh at birds.
She sees me and I
blink back.

Wende Crow’s poems and stories have appeared in Ploughshares, LIT, New Haven Review, Inquisitive Eater, and Hartskill Review, among other journals. She received her MFA from the New School and teaches poetry for the International Writer’s Institute in Amsterdam.