Discarded

The walk up the driveway.-
No one had taken it or a while. It was a walk;
A short walk, less than a minute –
Less than thirty seconds.

No one wants to come here, I was told.
He was the only one who would take me –
He hadn’t taken the walk, either,
Not for a while.

No one fed the animals;
It was inescapable to lean over
As one rubbed against my leg –
Utterly dreadful to touch it.

They were ravenous,
Emaciated and crying from pain.
They cried and kept crying;
And were dying. I wanted to sleep.

I sat for hours in your trailer,
Called home once,
Jacked up on cinder blocks,
Leaning unsafely, discarded like trash.

Cats, stray cats, your cats, neighborhood cats –
They assumed it as a dwelling,
Free to live and eliminate
And claim the abandoned territory.

The revolting smells seeped into my skin,
Wrapping me with remorse as I rummaged
Your belongings, searching for a letter
Somewhere in a box.

I couldn’t tolerate the smell or stomach
The idea of someone finding it;
In time, I couldn’t tell the difference
Between the odor of cat, humidity –

Sweat, or tears, absorbing every part
Of me. Profoundly bottomless,
Endless in time, brutally fused;
Tormented between then and now and before.

You were always the mother, always the adult –
Always the adult, always the mother.
Humidity, sweat, tears, heat, the smell -
All distinctively easier to differentiate from who you were.

Or were not.