Thread

If I once slipped through the open eye
of the needle, know
it was your tongue
that sang me through.

Previously published in Birmingham Poetry Review, Issue 52, 2025

True

“All you have to do is write one true sentence.”
–Ernest Hemingway

Another hurricane arrives today,
and yet Hemingway’s cats will remain prowling around,
arching their backs against doorways, clawing after mice.
His house now silent and free of tourists, rests with shutters
latched, wrapped up as tightly as a clenched fist.

You never would have evacuated. Even if
the governor demanded it, you would have stayed
sitting in your recliner, weather radio crackling beside you.
You’d read a novel while keeping an eye on the storm.

This would be after nailing plywood to the windows, flinging
outdoor furniture into the pool, filling each bathtub to the rim,
cigarette, an endless red ember between your lips, coffee thrumming
through your veins. There was a careful madness to the way
you prepared. This was survival—and you lived for it.

Like Hemingway, we once owned a six-toed cat.
You brought her home a good luck charm, a scrapping tabby
with a black M tattooed between her ears, and feet that loomed
so large, it was as though she were wearing boxing gloves.

At night, we would hear her hissing and spitting on the roof
as she took on whatever creature came across her path.
In the morning, she would leave gifts on the porch—
a tuft of fur from a squirrel, half a bird’s spidery rib cage,
the small white stomach of a bunny. It’s how she showed love.

I can’t remember how she died, but I do remember
how she once scratched Mom’s arm, and how that scratch
rose white and long, blood piercing the surface in a straight line
so that it bled from wrist to elbow. As she whimpered, you snatched
that cat by the loose skin of her neck, slid the sliding glass door sideways
so it bounced backward on its track, and threw her out into the night
with such force that she landed in the branches of a tree.
She didn’t come down for two days.

Hemingway wouldn’t have left either—he would have lingered
long over what he built, cursing at the fucking storm. There, at his house,
cemented to the concrete trim of the swimming pool his second wife
wanted, is a coin. The pool, which workers pickaxed through coral
to build, took over two years to finish. When he got the bill,
he threw the last of his money down on the flagstone, yelling the bitch
had spent all he had, so she may as well take his last penny.

We once camped in the Keys, and when we left, we had to cut
the straps from our tent with a hatchet because the stakes,
which took hours to hammer into the same coral,
simply would not let go.

My cousins told me that you once drove your Jag
from New York City to Key West in less than fifteen hours.
You pissed out the window so you wouldn’t have to stop.
You were on leave. You wanted a drink.
In plain sight in Hemingway’s garden is the urinal
he carted home for blocks from Sloppy Joe’s Bar, where it is said
he pissed away his money, now a drinking fountain for those six-toed cats.

Upstairs in one of his bedrooms, a ceramic statue of a cat
sits up on top of a dresser, eyeing everything—a trade
from Picasso for a box of hand grenades. Her mane flows
backward in the same colors used to mark the Southernmost Point
of the United States. She possesses a perfect heart, painted
on the left side of her chest. And though she has only three toes
on each of her feet and lives under a case of plexiglass,
she will withstand this storm.

She’s already outlived you both.

Previously published in Triggerfish Critical, Issue 20, 2017.

The World

Ball-peen hammer heavy in my small hand; 
the lid of the washer shut like a closed mouth.
My chore: hit the knob of the broken Kenmore 
with a hammerblow the moment it kicked to spin.
But there in front of me stood the world—
open and outspread. Each country defined 
in delicate pastel, outlined by thick borders, imprinted 
atop the folding metal table for which my dad was proud 
to have paid three dollars at a yard sale. It summoned
me that afternoon to find the names of places 
I’d only heard on TV: Puerto Vallarta, Oahu, Seoul.  
In the rusted corner, the compass rose—a small star 
pointing out the arrangement of everything. And the click 
went unheard as I explored landforms rising like breasts 
I didn’t yet have, the Brooks Range nestled 
into the neck of the Rockies, the cinching 
of the Sierra Madres, the wicked hip 
of the Andes. Suds slopping out 
the washer, whitewater puddling the hard 
cement floor. And me so quick with that hammer, 
the corner so sharp, my wrist too soft as rust bit 
into flesh and a dark river rose to stream 
down my forearm—a flood of blood 
on Ayres Rock, Brisbane and Sydney, the Coral Sea. 

O mop, O bucket, O washer, O wrist, 
O map-so-gloriously-unfolded, O aged-white line—
a constant reminder of how this world will scar.

Previously published in The Shore, Issue 9, 2021.

The Birth

Four o’clock in the morning, 
and the floor where my mother led me.
Our black lab panting on her side, tongue lolling 
out her mouth, two small pups
tugging at puffed-up teats, a pale
squirming sac beside her. Watch,
my mother mouthed, and the dog nudged
until the fluid-filled blister burst to reveal 
a wet dark mass of quaking life. And I watched 
as our dog licked the newborn
dry, even its hind, then went on to chewing the cord 
until she freed pup from self. The eating of afterbirth, 
tossing her head to get all to the far recess of throat,
and on she went again to the panting, breath 
heavy with labor until the next sac appeared, clear 
glistening in the half-light. Finger 
to her lips, my mom whispered, 
every child should see this at least once, 
and took my small hand into her own. The last one,
the final pup not moving, not breathing, 
not coming into life, even with its sac broken, and the mother 
so tired of prodding—was it dead? 
Pale blue bathrobe ribboned
with blood, my mother scooped that runt
into the palm of her hand, swept 
the inside of its toothless mouth with the tip 
of her smallest finger. The tiniest sputter of liquid, a rasp 
of oxygen into miniscule lungs—and I, not knowing 
in the stillness of that moment that I was holding my own 
breath, could once more, breathe.

Previously published, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize finalist, 2023.

Another Fox

after Lucille Clifton

All night I dreamed of the soft padding 
of gloved feet along the grass.  
In cloaked distance, I heard 
the elongated rasp 
of her bark. 

There are things in this life 
of which we are not yet aware.  

Later, in daylight, 
when my dog lunged 
from under long winds of wisteria, 
the black-tipped triangles of the vixen’s ears 
cocked backward, the fiery fur at her neck rose
in alarm. And when both creatures
bared teeth in a flash of spit & snarl,
the fox stopped to look over her shoulder. 
Without hesitation, she flung herself up and over 
the fence, tail nothing more than a gasp 
of white against chain link.  

Who was I to know 
what she might be protecting? O Spirit, 
what was I to know, if not myself?

Previously published in Gargoyle, Issue 75, 2022.

Migration

After the world is finished with autumn’s fire, 
I leave this city.  

Darkness exposed; the trees have already begun 
to bare themselves for winter—

winding limbs clench fistfuls 
of color-leached leaves.  

Along the roadside, plumes of marsh grasses nod; 
the poison sumac’s fingers splay and continue to smolder.
  
Mile by monotonous mile, the reflective steel of this bay 
divides us—another half-moon fades into blue.

Previously published in The End of 83, Volume 3, 2017.

© Copyright Tara Elliott, all rights reserved