en route with cats by Alex Innocent

this car is full of cats.

the tonkinese on the rear

view mirror dangling

from a distended claw

a christmas nicknack

gold and champagne twizzling

anticlockwise obscuring

the highway.

shuttling

between the pedals

a tortoisehell loom

between my frantic

feet. I can’t brake.

I can’t accelerate.

the smallest abyssinian

pops

up the bonnet wrenching

from the cross pistons’ fists

the engine’s sooty shins.

smoke fills this metal barrel

breeding desperation

for the ventolin

but my bag

is thick with cats. pouring

through the handles

in a demerara avalanche

they arch and enlarge

a microscope slide

busting with bacteria.

rolling over its brim

a boiling pan of cats

plump

with malevolence

stalagmiting its base

as their laughter frosts

its walls. my gasped expanding

vapour ossifies my nose

and my lungs are spitting

cats hanging sagging cats.

inverted cats, firs for tails,

bantering with venin,

inside one another’s pinching

faces, suffocating my throat

these mordant

hatchling cats this car is full of

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Alex Innocent is a writer from Yorkshire, based in East Anglia. Among her very favourite things are coffee, prime numbers, and writing third person biographies like this.