When We Knew We Were Wrong for Each Other
It was one of those days between a tight poll and an election,
when anything still seemed possible,
at a time of the afternoon when the light was both glary
and art-historian evocative,
and you said, hypothetically, if you absolutely had to choose
between two eerie animal hybrids,
that you’d opt for a cat with a human’s head,
not a human with a cat’s head,
and I was so thrown off my stride that I would have testified
in court that dusk was dawn—
yes, if memory serves, it was at that exact yoctosecond.
Or it could have been all along.
Erik Kennedy is the author of, most recently, Another Beautiful Day Indoors (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022). His work has been published in places like berlin lit, FENCE, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. He lives in Christchurch, New Zealand.