It's a real poem

This poem received an Honorable Mention in the Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Poetry Contest (pant pant), and was published in Comstock Poetry Review earlier this year. And, since you can't find it on-line...

Real Poem

 

Open mike, she comes up to ask me, were those real poems, or did I just make them up. I confess:  I just make them up. Her look says I thought as much. So many years I have faked it, getting credit for stuff I just made up. What you are reading here, for instance. It's not a real poem, just one I made up. This poem did not come from a certified breeder, someone who could vouch for the pedigree of the parents. Nah, it's a mutt, a Heinz 57, a tabby-tortie-tiger-cat, maybe even missing a tail. At the computer it will not leave me alone. Make a real poem out of me, it hisses, prowling across the keyboard, make me a real poem. At my desk, I made a nest for it from my grandmother's shawl, the one she crocheted even before she married my grandfather the head baker of Lodz. The poem deliberately lies sprawled across the paper I'm trying to write on, or it swarms up my shoulder, then lodges under my chin. I can't even see what my hand is doing. Sometimes I try to write without looking, but my hands crawl a row up or a key over, and the whole thing transposes into code, spilling out and leaking onto the table, disappearing into the carpet. Sometimes I lose track of the lines and go right off the rails, maybe even over the edge. But when the poem is satisfied I am not ignoring it, it lets me write. It curls up in the shawl-nest and sleeps, breathing in quick little bursts, snoring tiny snores, feet twitching as it dreams.