Let’s say I keep a tidy kitchen. I like to think that my things are in the kitchen.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Let’s say we live in a single room. The cat is always at our feet. We live in a single room, so we can’t help but be near.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Let’s say he puts his hands on me when I’m trying to whisk the eggs, when I’m pulling something creative from inside of me and he is at my skin.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Let’s say he tells me when I misspell omelet in a text message.<\/p>\n
He’s been saying this kind of thing for a while: He loves the way I fold the napkin, but not the way I fold down the sheets.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
In the shower, he drips on my forehead. The sheen of him transferred on to me, where I can’t see. The cat meows from the other side of the shower curtain.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Let’s say he swallows hard at the smiley-face I penned at the top of his napkin. Dots and lines that don’t meet, drawn with a marker called permanent.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Let’s say I read with the next page held up, ready to turn.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
One more thing before you go, he says, walking away from me.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Saturday is the indentation of his stomach. The blot of the cat’s black paw print on his shin. He doesn’t eat. He doesn’t stop eating.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
His hand circles softly around the cat’s paw. His hand encircles the cat’s paw. He sleeps for long hours with his eyes blotted out.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
The road doesn’t stop me. The road under foot shouldn’t be thought of, yet I am thinking of the road. And the sign I pass that announces a lost cat.<\/p>\n
Janelle Adsit’<\/strong>s poetry, book reviews, and essays appear in publications such as Confrontation, Caketrain, Mid-American Review, Colorado Review,<\/em> and ForeWord<\/em>. She is a doctoral candidate at SUNY Albany where she teaches creative writing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Let’s say I keep a tidy kitchen. I like to think that my things are in the kitchen. * * * Let’s say we live in a single room. The cat is always at our feet. We live in a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":384,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[22132],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=916"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2086,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/916\/revisions\/2086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}