Justin Karcher
On the 4th of July, the St. Francis statues in the backyard gardens of my neighborhood spring into life. They cast aside their stone devotion and nimbly walk through the tall flowers. Then, they hop on the backs of cemetery deer freed from their grassy gates and ride through the West Side herding scared animals away from the cheap meteor showers. On the corner of Grant and W Delavan, motorcyclists race through the guts of a regretful Prometheus, a teen armed with a bazooka full of candles takes aim at the dark of an abandoned lot and a mama cat scared to death with her back against the facade of the empty Jackson Hewitt hisses at the drunk angry light. She and her kids are lassoed to safety by a patron saint and I’m left alone on the corner underneath a streetlight wondering why I’m still here or why my friends don’t invite me to cookouts in the burbs anymore. Maybe it’s because I haven’t stopped blowing off the fingers of my heart in pursuit of fire. I promise I’m healthier now. Still, it would be a crime to stop listening to the purring in this hard world.
Justin Karcher is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart-nominated poet and playwright from Buffalo.
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TRASH CAT LIT 