A Cleansing
For Dennis Sarfate
A cat named Fred, my uncle’s timid
dark lady, crawls from under the truck
to salmonize my allergic skin,
making me wish this body:
asthmatic-abdominous-addicted,
retained the sight of witch-doctors,
who sprung the cat within
the panther, to know how I might stir
the wolf in me,
to douse my sin, my anxiety before
women who uncover the field mice
in the underbrush of men’s faces.
Daniel Matlock is a ranch hand in the Sonoran Desert. His fiction, poetry, and nonfiction appear in Maricopa Community College’s Passages anthology, Haiku Expo, and The Creative Cafe. He’s also served as an Associate Editor for Everyone Change Volume III: An Anthology of Climate Fiction, and as a Student Fiction Editor at the Superstition Review. He studies creative writing at Arizona State University.
