Erin Carlyle’s work has been featured in magazines such as The Yellow Medicine Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Third Point Press. Her poetry is largely informed by the southeastern countryside and a childhood living in poverty. She holds a MA in Literary and Textual Studies from Bowling Green State University and a graduate certificate in Gender and Women’s Studies from Western Kentucky University. Her most recent work focuses on the effects of gender, class, geography, and cultural memory on the body, particularly how the body’s dissociation from the individual is dependent upon one’s circumstance. At the present, she lives in Bowling Green, Ohio with her cat Frankie.
Being Old and Vulnerable and Cat Mythologies
She is not the brilliant head of anything. She sits slack and never learns. You bring her dreams fully back to their beginnings. Is she a bird girl or a deer girl? Which one is the one that is the best to be? If she were a cat, how could she have chased you under all of that dust and distance while you never follow anything that isn’t a hard pill to swallow? Here is a story: once, a long time ago, nothing happened and all of the people everywhere burned in their stomachs because they wanted something. You little old thing. What is the age that is the age that no one will comment on? Can’t be the same one that the cat whispered you’d die at. Sly thing under the couch. She hides from the thunder of course. She licks her fur until she is clean of course. She reminds us that we eat dirt in the desert. She forgets to tell us not to rub her against the grain.