us animal people walking downtown in our big baggy shirts and pendants that show what we are and laughing about a solitary meow or people staring like we're wild gods with wild eyes that are green and grey beneath the surface
we come into the real witch shop and buy skulls and bones and the hot rain of prickled dead fur, fake claws because in our bald-monkey heads we know that we shouldn't be cruel but true bones have a resonance that vibrates at the bottom of the ribs
we go out and get small on the lawn, the couch, the park and I could swear that we were shining woody and wet, muzzles pushing out of our faces but we're still feeling the corners of our realness at the center and the core
we purr and murr into the phone and keep each other sane by night hours telling stories of laughing cats or jaguar gods or how wolves are crabby and old and beautiful or how in the shape of your chin you look just like a lynx
we are cats in cities and wolves in towns and often big black birds or scaly but that's only on the inside and neither shouted nor stifled but there like blue eyes or the sun
we are thin- or thick-skinned rosy or fair or brown-dark but it's not the color of the eyes that changes and it's not quite the self that changes it's the way things bend around you and whether or not you want to run.