The Zingara Project

Tag: Tidal Echoes

  • Stray Cat by Jenny McBride

    Victoria park
    where I was running
    the ducks at water’s edge suddenly running too
    and in the empty space of their wake
    a tattered cat.
    I called him on his hunting
    and he meowed, ran after me
    hungry, lonely, being eaten alive by the city
    but I ran to lose him
    not because I don’t love cats
    or didn’t want to rescue his painful life
    but because I was far from home in a conference hotel.
    Was it the same
    with the men I approached
    when I was young and lonely?
    I always took it personally
    but maybe they were just figures rendered useless
    in the scheme of things
    on the day my heart was warming
    and years later
    they paused to scratch out an excuse.
    —

    Jenny McBride’s writing has appeared in Common Ground Review, Rappahannock Review, The California Quarterly, Conclave, Tidal Echoes, Streetwise, and other publications. She makes her home in the rainforest of southeast Alaska.

  • Like the Dancing Horse by Jenny McBride

    If they were fully aware
              the invested misery,
              the scathing abuse
              and the bludgeoning of perfection
    Would they renounce their gilded ease,
              their snappy playthings,
              hypnotic tomorrows?
    If we could show
              the privileged marauders
              who have never seen their own footprint
              the toll and mortgage of
              their artificial lifestyle,
              all the stock they’ve bought in climate change,
    Would they shriek and flee
              or gaze unapologetically
              like an audience that watches
              a live bear
              slowly lowered into the boiling water?

    Jenny McBride’s writing has appeared in The California Quarterly, Tidal Echoes, Green Social Thought, Star 82 Review and other journals.  She makes her home in the rainforest of southeast Alaska.