We present a selection from The Ethics of Cats, the debut poetry collection from acclaimed writer and memoirist Alice Kinsella.
The Ethics of Cats navigates the tensions between domesticity and wildness, history and the self, these poems shift fluidly between personal reckoning and collective consciousness, from the intimate disarray of motherhood to the ghosted architectures of Ireland’s institutional past, and the rising tide of the climate crisis.
Evolution
Cats are no more natural than plastic.
Felis catus, the littlest ones,
the sort who flush toilets online.
We [extracted] a naturally occurring
feline / fossil fuel
and [processed]
produced
an ideal.
look at my beautiful
cat. Her name in rhinestone on her collar.
It looks just like the real thing!
We are terribly efficient.
*
I was sure this was an exact
and brilliant metaphor. Yet
again, I am spectacularly
incorrect. Scientifically,
cats are useless.
Cats are remarkedly similar
to their wild cousins.
Their breeding is not selected
or controlled like dogs, cattle, horses,
other once wild pack animals.
They don't provide
us with milk, wool, transport.
It is unlikely the wild ancestors of cats
were captured and harnessed for their mousing
abilities. Dogs would have been more efficient.
It is more likely that wild cats hung
around human settlements and fed on the vermin
we generated. Friendly and clever, our ancestors
tolerate theirs. If domestication took place,
the instigator is uncertain.
*
Cats are perfectly capable
of living wild, or feral, to use
the term for a creature once captive,
living as if wild. A cat may identify
as a wild animal. Or it may identify
as your baby. leaping to your arms
at the sound of a ring pull can.
*
A cat chooses the owner,
although it is worth mentioning
cats are not known for drowning children
in bog holes or dropping off their humans
at a shelter when their landlord says NO PETS.
However, a cat may abscond for the neighbour’s
without leaving so much as a note.
It may live comfortably two fields over
in the house where the mam buys wet
cat food, not the dry shite from Lidl,
while you plaster Facebook and the community
centre window with MISSING posters.
*
Cats live alongside humans. Our care
does not constitute our control of them.
An environmental disaster (of course),
but they’re not domesticated, not properly.
They keep us a little bit wild.
The Doctor (Who?) was a Woman
I'm a Timelord, now: two hearts.
An everyday biological anomaly.
Feel the double tic-tic when the wand
is pressed to me. A clock with the future
intact. I’m a sci-fi reality. Genes releasing
each scene to come. The past is etched
into each beat of my belly. Across my breasts
grow saplings, branches; that vein is your family tree.
We, now, not a me. We’re imaginary.
Tight jeans, taste for salt, bus stop throw-up.
A secret, a hush, and a photo of a bean.
I feel like I made you up.
(Re)wild
This infinity of weeks is flying.
Elastic time snaps back to childhood summers.
Somewhere, deep in memory's foundation,
I see a buzzing hive, a sky dizzy with birds.
Now, you paw pears, raspberries,
slices of sweet tomato.
You laugh at the cat’s lawn acrobatics,
watch your first swallow loop the open field.
I scroll news sites on my phone,
hold fear in my mouth, like an almost rotten fruit.
We plant hazel, willow, oak.
The too few bees zig-zag between the blossoms.
Summers will unfold
sooner than we expect.
Ziggy
Flotsam like, she washes up at our house
after a storm. Bedraggled and sneezing,
one eye weeping and gummed shut,
the other a sea-green bean. Three bowls already
to fill, there’s no room at the inn! But God loves
an outcast or at the very least, I do. Lungs crackling
like a new fire, she knocks herself over with a sneeze.
Malnourished, blind in one eye, she’s likely on borrowed
time. The vet bill costs more than my car. With the
asymmetrical gaze of Stardust, her marmalade zigzag,
she spends a year biting my ankles for Felix, noosing
herself around Cat Dad. She’s a school-run stowaway
turn interactive show & tell surprise. ’til one autumn
morning, I mistake her for a heap of wet leaves.
Curled on the roadside, nose to tarmac
like it’s another cat’s bum. She looks up to me
unseeing, sea-bean replaced by a balloon
of crimson. Still, her shaky chest heaves.
The vet does X-rays, a drip, a sedative, a snip.
Miracle. No damage done; except the one good eye.
Another groan-summoning bill, then she’s home,
bumping noses with doorframes, eating the finest
of tinned mush in gravy, sharpening claws on my chin.
She’s either the luckiest or most unlucky cat in the world.
It’s all about perspective, really,
which is ironic, considering she has none.
Existential Crisis as Anthropocene
The forest bathing experience at the budget spa is fitting.
No more a forest than the chlorine-sticky hot tub
is a spring. Lines of bristling towers staccato
my vision. Thoughts uninterrupted by traffic or birdsong.
I walk barefoot from the sauna
to a clearing. Quarry gravel indents
my soles. I am thirty tomorrow.
A mother, an ex-wife, a lover.
Chilly with this Irish March, I retreat
to the body-warm pool, our public solitude.
His wet kiss closes my lids.
Overhead a crow shrieks.
At home, the cat kills another mouse, fat
on the detritus of what we buy and don't eat.
The Ethics Of Cats is published by Broken Sleep books
