A big ‘thank you’ to Ramona Herdman for today’s poem. It’s from her wonderful pamphlet A Warm and Snouting Thing published in 2019 by Emma Press. Ramona will be guest poet later this year, after her collection with Nine Arches Press has appeared in print.

Two cats on a Valentine’s card

For one bribed instant, they sat
in a heart shape: double-tail-curled
rumps the heart’s bumps,
heads close enough to bite.
You can see they don’t fool
each other an inch, don’t try.

This is one split-second’s flicker
in a ticker tape of sniff,
cuff, hiss, hysterical arching,
pantomime affront, huff off,
real pinching hate,
play-fight, indignant alliance.

Everyone in on this –
the animal-handler,
photographer, graphic artist,
printer, shop assistant –
knows it as cheap con, nothing
like the on and on of coupledom.

If you buy it, fool, do it
knowingly. Write I am the cat
who walks by himself. Some nights
I choose to curl close. That’s it. You want
my heart? OK. My heart’s
like that.