The cat with the broken leg I cannot catch. The starving dog with the ribs I cannot catch. The filthy matted dog who cannot even see yet I cannot catch. I’ve left cans of wet food and scatterings of tuna. I’ve made myself seem small. Why do I bother lost and desperate things? I question my own motives. I seem to tell about it a lot. There’s a ledger, and a weight, and a weary, overworked man whittling my heart down to a feather.
By Craig Finlay
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Craig is a some-of-the-time poet and most-of-the-time librarian currently on an Omaha leg of a lifelong tour of the Midwest. His first collection, The Very Small Mammoths of Wrangel Island, was published in 2021 by Urban Farmhouse Press. Someone once described it to him as “Wikipedia poetry, and a review in Pembroke Magazine said it could “double as a trivia night preparation packet.” Craig is okay with both of those assessments.