Exposed
By Jane McKinley
November 15, 2024
November 15, 2024
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The day before our sister’s funeral,
the cat, upset by the commotion, nabbed her shut-eyed newborns, one by one, stole up the back stairs, disappeared. She’d reappear at mealtimes,
eat voraciously, and thwarting our attempts to follow, kept vanishing from windowsills. For several nights we heard the kittens:
tiny cries within the walls, mouse movement, scritch of sharp new claws. Then, one night, nothing. Our mother, certain they were dead,
began to dread the stench, their quick decay in August heat, those stifling days we barely noticed. One morning, after breakfast, we lay in wait,
stationing ourselves behind cracked doors to track the cat’s clandestine route, up the attic staircase to her lair. With her head, she lifted a loose floorboard,
slipping through to feed four mewling mouths. Exposed, the kittens stared at us, wide-eyed and wild, terrified by what they saw. We didn’t know then that we would live
like kittens under the floor, that just beyond our closed eyelids, everything was black, that we’d keep getting snagged
on nails sticking down from above, that when we emerged from darkness, the bright light would sting. |
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Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist and founder and longtime artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble. She is the author of two poetry collections: Vanitas (Texas Tech UniversityPress, 2011), which won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize, and Mudman, forthcoming from Able Muse Press. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Baltimore Review, on Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In 2023 she was awarded a poetry fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has recently finished a series of poems based on the life of Bach's second wife, Anna Magdalena, three of which will appear in the spring issue of The Southern Review.
Website: janemckinley.com
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Author’s Note:
I never set out to write poetry. It just happened. A poem came to me while I was driving through the rain. The poem helped to dispel an image that had haunted me for decades: the silhouette of my eldest sister lying in a casket when I was twelve. This loss and others, including the death of my youngest sister from juvenile diabetes, inhabit the three poems here, as well as my first two collections.