The trials of rescuing a cat while on probation

1996 was a strange year, but then they all are.

Discordia does not, it turns out, hate everything. Every other week, we share a piece of work from some artists who've earned our respect and affection. Today Jordan Williamson brings us two dispatches from the lighter side of total alienation.

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The Trials of Rescuing a Cat While on Probation

I thought about what to tell my P.O.
I fulfilled community service picking up trash
with a claw-like device outside the library 
on Tuesdays between 10am and 2pm.
Plots are a strange matter. The fire department 
put out one of those life nets,
presumably for the cat to jump to safety.
Cat killer! Cat killer! they shouted
wailing balls of snow and ice
from a Zamboni dump pile.
This complicated things with the cat.
Cooler heads did not prevail. 
I had come this far— suspended in a tree, 
wrangling the little piss-missile.
She was impossibly strong,
had the chaotic will of thirty, or forty cats.
I desired only to return home
and take something out of the freezer.
I was feeling a little misunderstood.

1996

The president was in the Rose Garden.
You never saw any roses.
Ralph Lauren released his Rodeo Drive collection,
a backpack exploded at the Summer Olympics.
They continued until somebody won the long jump.
Our teacher went off early with gestational diabetes,
she came back with a baby.
There was a lesson to be learned there,
we learned math instead.
Swapped the old Dodge Caravan for a new one.
Cereal was part of it.
You either had the best time, or it was awful.
Your friends sucked or they didn’t suck.
People sewed their own curtains, people sewed.
You woke up to a man on tv
cooking a roast in a sweaty little oven.
The smell of the phonebook was part of it,
scrambled porn was part of it.
Nylon was having a moment.
Ellen hadn’t come out but Friends was heating up.

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JORDAN WILLIAMSON is a poet from London Ontario. His recent work has appeared in BAD DOG MAG, PRISM International and The Malahat Review.

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Interested in being a Fellow Traveller? Email your poetry, prose, visual art, etc. to discordia.sucks@gmail.com. We pay (not much), and pieces are collected a few times a year in a small print edition.

Fellow Travellers “Eyes” banner adapted from Opal Louis Nations’ “An Eyeball Alphabet” (1980).

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