Lisa Ampleman

There’s a Bobcat in the Neighborhood

Keep your pets in. Sure,
in online photos, the buff-
colored blaze could be
just a large housecat.
But look at its bulk
by that paneled pool,
the storage shed fashioned
to look like a barn.
That’s some cousin of a cougar
wandered up from Mill Creek.

Its screams at night will give you
gooseflesh. I saw it piss
on the neighbors’ play-place,
crawl up the slide to
the pirate-ship perch
as if that’s where it would
make its den. No one’s
seen it during the day.

That pack of teens on
their yowling dirt bikes,
a pickup with a segregationist
flag that slowed
as it passed the Allans’,
the savage gesture of
one bus-stop girl to another
when she thought no one
else could see: you can’t keep
the threat of wildness out, even here.

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Lisa Ampleman is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Romances (LSU Press, 2020), and a chapbook. She lives in Cincinnati, where she is the managing editor of The Cincinnati Review and poetry series editor at Acre Books.