There’s a new cat at the shelter
with thin and greasy ginger fur
and a broken tail.
He is all bone –
Borris, they’ve named him –
and is blind in one eye,
which is glassed over.
He has a mouth full of stained
and mostly missing teeth,
a seeing eye of green,
and a small cry.
Later, he stops weeing and is put to sleep.
I can’t stop thinking of him and wondering.
I dream of him and in my dreams,
I want to make it better,
to make it different for Borris.
But there is nothing in my dreams.
Carla Chait has a master’s degree in English Literature and was awarded the 2012 Deon Hofmeyr Prize for Creative Writing at the University of the Witwatersrand. She has had poetry and short fiction appear in local literary journals and online. In 2022, she published a novel, Floor 1.