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
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.