Ode to Bodega Cats
In the window of my grandfather’s corner store, a cat dressed in my hijab. I feed her titans of war, pluck Muhammed Ali out her chest wound, sharpen her a legend in the lake at midnight. Outside, a wave of Yemeniyat beat a man after he gropes someone’s daughter in the crowded street. They do it all in abayas. Full-veiled niqabs. Unstoppable ninjas with a hundred power-ups. And I know each one had a bodega cat as a sibling. We learned the ecology of courage, how to weave one into our biology, the kind with a third-world gut and claws out for the cops. What’s the word for a bodega cat’s disciple? Vroomed exhaust, indecent daughter, gray impression on the grid, ruthless? We keep our scars. They throb when we pass their glowing eyes, invasive as a second language. If anyone has taught us to fend for ourselves, it’s the cats on Tremont Ave. The cats here are made from nothing. One day, nameless limbs, small square of sidewalk, like a fig fallen too soon. The next, a gang member’s mascot, beast born from an Arab’s love and coked-up rats. A woman in tragedy also grows that fast, turns from whimpers to wind in seconds with the right kind of violence, and after, makes herself a home for the lost who look for it. Even the drunks that enter can sense these cats are off-kilter. They take her on anyway, leave with one less eye and night terrors. She gobbles the glass bottles they swing, spits them out as bullets, laps their blood like a creature of darkness. She conflates the brute with the hero. She kills her kids with calmness, knows how these streets latch on to anything too green. Bodega Cat Sensei doesn’t give a single fuck. What is there to fear when you’ve already licked the edge? I want to be that baddie. That bitch. That witchy intuition wrung tight as my braids. Won’t find me frozen in the woods with my scarf stuffed in my mouth. Won’t find me as a scraggle scaled salmon swimming upriver, flung into a muddy ditch and left to rot. I’ll be funnel of yellow heat who goes running into a field. All I want is to be an adequate ancestor to the Yemeni women who come after. Who visit my grave with bundles of nut meat for their great- auntie with the immortal hips, that, myth says, broke high facility fences and let out all the paperless. Future long-haired girls gliding above all that had happened before them. Who will salt their stories with my own living and become part of it. So after this lunch break, I’ll head to work and whistle back at the guy who shouts, Nice tits because it’s true. I do have nice tits. And a nice peach emoji, and a birth story, a Khaleesi walking out the fire. Let them find me dressed only in leaves, bathing with bodega cats and their panther mothers, breasts wagging akimbo. I can’t forget those women who clapped back. Who did not wear worry with each black layer. Did not let things happen as they usually do then drop like rotted fruit when it was over.
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