Polly Conway
The worst is coming. Petunia, a lost cat, is missing in your area. But this is cool: an Año Nuevo seal ate too much purple kelp and turned purple, still laying fat and sassy with its plain gray brethren. Dare to be different. Dare to steal a special shell from a protected beach because you need it super bad. Dare to spit seawater back into the ocean. After a swim, my mouth tastes like oysters and distant coffee. I pick sand from my teeth, wipe away a gritty beard green with seaweed flakes. BB, a lost cat, is missing in your area. I’ve lived a long time. I know how to work a waffle cone machine. Can do an Irish jig. Knit a little hat. I know how to wait. People in Canada don’t know Mr. Rogers. He means nothing to them no matter how much you explain his sweaters, his kindness. They know Mr. Dressup instead. Who even is that? Basalt, a lost cat, is missing in your area. They gave my husband a bottle with thirty Ativans so he could slide into the MRI machine, face encased in 3-D printed plastic, listening to that singular hammer song for a solid hour. He never takes them because he is brave and also he has to go to work after. I am not brave and I cannot bear the weight but every night I put my stained mouthguard in, strap on my CPAP and let it give me breath.
Polly is a writer and editor based in Alameda, CA. Her poems have appeared in One Art, Wildscape Literary Journal, MEMEZINE, Pictura, Catamaran Literary Reader, and others. She is the Poetry Editor at Nulla, and completed a residency at Ou Gallery on Vancouver Island in 2026. Polly holds an MFA in Poetry from California College of the Arts.
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TRASH CAT LIT 