by Svetlana Sterlin
I wrote this poem long ago.
Longer, by the time it finds you.
We’ve since adopted (in every way
but the real one) a cat. Scratching affection
into the wedge between my thumb
and forefinger—same spot where
in Year 12 my friend dug out
a piece of flesh. Laughing
by the canteen for reasons I wish
I remembered. A month later we turned
seventeen. I spent a week
in the country she called home;
my birth country—a detail I need
to remind myself of. When I returned
we never spoke again. The cat now
naps beside me, purring missives
to its cousins (in every way
but the real one) on the flip-side
of the planet, stuck in the daylight
of some past. Does the cat dwell
as I do, in/on days that have fled
into that past? One moment ticks
to the next; the present folds eternally into
some past that ticks along with these keys.
Svetlana Sterlin writes prose, poetry, and screenplays in Meanjin. A swimming coach and former swimmer, much of her work draws inspiration from in and around the pool (including her online publication, swim meet lit mag). Her debut poetry collection, If Movement Was a Language, won the 2023 Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award and is available now with Vagabond Press. You can find her words in Island, Westerly, Cordite, the Australian Poetry Anthology, and elsewhere.
Hyades Magazine 