Phillip Sterling

Black and Red

If I were a noun,
July would be my sentence
and we would state
the obvious:

The cat’s in the barn.

Foolishly, it would seem,
July so straightfaced
and redundant, a month
without a sense of humor

(unlike November,
that Rube Goldberg,
answering the foolish
with more foolishness:

“The cat’s in the barn?”
“No, she’s
diving for quarters
in the water trough”).

What choice do I have
as a noun? Cat? Barn?
I’m bored, says the boy
who’d rather be a verb,

even a sedentary one
(if there is such a thing,
to be no longer trending
on any of his media).

A cat prowls the barn,

it seems, flavors the month
remarkably. Which is all
to say how tired I am
of the neighbors—

those abject adjectives—
their incessant music
and laughter, their
cicadan lawn equipment,

their happy splashing
in the blow-up kiddie pool . . .
Why, even our tomatoes
in their mute complacency

wish the cat were tawny
or tortoiseshell, the barn
painted in some shade
other than the one it is.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Phillip Sterling’s books include two full-length collections of poetry (And Then Snow, Mutual Shores) and five chapbook-length series of poems, the most recent of which, Short on Days, will be released from Main Street Rag in 2020. He is also the author of two collections of short fiction:  In Which Brief Stories Are Told (Wayne State U Press 2011) and Amateur Husbandry, a series of micro-fictions narrated by the domestic partner of a yellow horse (Mayapple 2019).