2023 Winners
This year's Dead Cat Poetry Prize is awarded in memory of
Aslan Cara Cookie Crunchie Rambo Sadboy Sharkey Surt Thalia Tobermory Kinsman and Willow
with thanks to everyone who entered and supported the contest. Thanks to your generous donations, the third Dead Cat Poetry Prize will be awarded in 2024.
2021 winners can be found here.
First Prize
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Thalia
When winter came early to the dark sky preserve, I remembered a heart of fur. Her rumble kept the thunder back; her paws were patchless and curious. She’s just over there, behind the yawn of night. Don’t look, but any of those stars could be her eyes.
Second Prize
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The Cat's Last Show
It was autumn when you showed, just. All listlessness and leaves. Trapeze-artist, you. My garden fence was no match for the arrival of an aerialist.
You were an ink-stain of a thing. All rough edges and no sheen – a patch-work boy. All weather-beaten and fiction. Surely, you were conjured up by will alone.
No – a path contrived of prints see-saws down the lawn, clumsy. You’re lovelorn and craving applause, so I am treated to a circus performance curated for one.
Cart-wheels and somersaults, tricks abound. I press my face clean up against the nearest window – I cheer from the best seat in the house.
You jump and flip, twirl and split, poised. Ballerina-slick. But, wait – what now? A great, iron mass is wheeled across your spontaneous set-up. Quick.
Your limbs shimmy into position, tail lingering – last to enter the iron void. What’s this? Something sparks alight. A firework in miniature crawling the length of rope, eking closer to your new, metal home. It’s the climax of your show, a record finale: the cannon rears its great, iron head and shoots you clean to the heavens.
by Emily Green
Third Prize
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Neighbours
My neighbour hung a kitten from a tree, not by a leather thong looped round its neck nor with a length of string – maybe he thought the bundle of bone and fur too light to snap the axis, sever the spinal cord. Instead, he stuffed it in a plastic bag and left it dangling in the Iberian sun. "It had a manky eye," he said; "It should be dead by now," and handed me a box of eggs from scraggy hens that scratch their claws blunt in a concrete coop. He swept a curve encompassing, "Family and animals, son lo mejor." Mangy sheep, grandkids, a tethered dog... I threw the eggs away.
by Gwyneth Box
Highly Commended
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Sadboy, a member of the Poets Square Cats Colony, gained fame online for his unwavering devotion to Lola, another feral cat. Their bond inspired many to donate to local cat shelters, and in 2023, Flatbush Veterinary opened the Sadboy and Lola Center for Community Cats. Shortly after, Sadboy passed away, leaving Lola alone on their favorite rooftop.
Arizona is for Lovers
My grandmother taught me about red string connecting lovers: crossing the globe
in skeins for the constellations to unravel: a cat’s cradle, birth of nebulas. The week I turned
eighteen, I fell asleep, wrist dangling off the bed and wrapped with yarn. That morning the knot
dislodged, wool spilled like laughter. Across the country: two tails slipping beneath dry
heat, tying sun to cheek to tongue to stomach to tangled cells, their red marking each
major arcana. On most tarot cards, the lovers look to clouds, snake tracing their shadows
like fate unspooling thread. Reversed, the pair close their eyes, relax into latticework– for him
clouds lower, coating him sleeping in white. That morning, she wakes on the terrace, empty
space filled with string unwinding. He’s under in a carrier, belly filled with red yarn instead
of breakfast. The car speeds towards the answer everyone closes their eyes for: unlock the crate
and you’ll hear whining, faint like fishing line skimming the pole. The vet lays him down, and in the background, jackdaws twit from a phone, ceiling painted blue
so when he squints, the bed is wood below him, cacti. She’s pacing, string
loosening from her tail with every turn his paws relax, so if you squint,
the monitor blurs continuous red.
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Charles Dickens' Cat, Bob, Considers Their Time Together
While he worked to candles
melting like stalactites,
I caught stars in the mousetraps
of my meows to inspire him.
He rewarded me with chicken
cut into jigsaw pieces, pebbles
of sausage slices and lamb
still bleating the countryside's
poetry. I couldn’t hear his love,
but felt it through his soft strokes.
I loved to sit on his lap
and purr to the stories recited
as the night performed its theatre.
Once, I accidently dipped my paw
in his inkwell and he stared in awe,
as if my mark was from a Greek god.
I left the paw to him as a parting gift.
Charles stuffed it and turned it
into a paper knife. How I move him
with the gentlest of movements —
a quiet dance twisting and turning
right into the afterlife.
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Late Night Radio
It is dark outside Inside I’m in the kitchen and the radio’s voice is saying
the Voyager Two spacecraft has given us information on the structure of the solar system.
I pull string along the cold tile floor and the crazed cat runs and slides biting machine
she slides again and the spacecraft reached interstellar space ten billion miles away
And the cat’s pupils are enlarging they’re gonna pop out of her skull
she’s caught the string kettle sings data sent by probes all the way through
the heliosphere her whiskers are so much wider than her face the heliosphere
is symmetrical at least in two places she wants to attack this pen
she’ll probably manage it as I’m slow from red wine warming my head
there’s distinct boundaries out there jumps in the density of plasma
by Helen Grant
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The Loving
It was a simple truth, and in the space of a doorbell,
ringing twice, a catastrophe confirmed.
Labradors can’t lie about their murders. Dead cats lie inert.
Just a bundle in my arms, this little being was fading out.
Now she’s in the sunshine, upstairs, next door, always the other room.
No need to check, I know. Sleeping in the loft where I have no reason to go.
I’ll let her come find me, when she wants, whenever she wants.
And that panting night I’ll push into a hole, an ‘o’ of pains.
That early winter can wait a few more days.
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Two Parts of Sharkey
I measure my life in units of Sharkey, who dusted the dawning And then made bonedust of one million birds and seconds and other small things. I remember the first time, first cat – You, lavender silvered field fur, Drew back from my kneading, pudgy hands – Slunk fast from my clumsy attempts to surprise you in the dawn garden. Sun comes up, and you’re a silver streak by the viney back wall. Someone calls me in for breakfast. You mellowed with time; I don’t remember how your fur felt When you still smoothly slipped through the watery air of dusk – But I do remember the knots of your spine under patchy fur At the end. You were different then: You were painfully living, where before you’d been a shade of the purpling. It was in the yellow kitchen summer mornings, n you’d tremble past my leg, yowling, Then it was I knew this vermiculated old bone girl had become alive. Now, I seek to see you still, in the yard, in the cool morning air, Where the dusty blue sky brushes the old vines: Who walks there? Mice, rampant, in their hollows– birds that make homes of your haunts. You were a ghost first and always, and now you have returned to your form. In the whispering morning, I see Sharkey reborn.
by E.J. Norton
Commended
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All She Can Do
Something is on the roof.
In my room, my book- case stands
In the shadow of the column, (which is a book- case,) lays the curled up cat and the curled up cat is my mother.
I say to the cat, which is my mother, there is something on the roof, please don’t let it in, but all she can do is purr.
by Helen Grant
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Guinness Sequence
Mottled ball of fluff,
snaffling elastics and
howling at the moon.
Missing for three days,
a perpetual question:
The kink in her tail.
Staring down a dog,
snagging unretracted claws
on flannelette sheets.
Feather-light and limp,
her tiny paws dipped in gold.
Ancient ritual.
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Love is a Many-Whiskered Thing
The old woman stares at the people dancing in her floral wallpaper.
Both eyes are a milky glaze where they once shone.
Now late stage, she has managed to outlive her friends,
Her family, her companions.
She strokes the soft toy in her lap,
It is filled with flax seeds
And lavender
And can be warmed in the microwave.
His name is Fergus.
The Real Fergus, who died 43 years ago, sits in a photo frame,
Whiskers upturned like the ends of a moustache.
Fergus and Real Fergus were and are a source of comfort
In her bleakest days, when everything she had
Wasn’t enough to protect her.
Real Fergus was a wedding gift from her husband, the most charming and loving man
She ever had the good fortune to meet.
Her husband brought home flowers, and danced with her in the kitchen
In the evenings, as they did when they were
Honeymooners, dancing under the Iberian moonlight,
To the chirping chorus of the crickets.
Her husband had quite the temper, though,
Behind the closed doors of married life,
In the bowels of domesticity.
And she lay by him, faithfully, waiting for the day when her groom would return,
Which he did.
But he never stayed.
She was always walking into doors and falling down the stairs, blackening her eye
On the newel post.
She would wait for him, wife and table dressed to perfection,
Not a thing to upset him but the mood he held
As he walked through the door.
Life with him was wonderful, except when it wasn’t:
A brief interlude to the man she fell in love with,
And the flowers and the dancing in the kitchen.
And Real Fergus would lick her wounds
With sandpaper tongue and let her moisten his fur
With salty tears.
In her eighth decade now, with her newel post memory,
Sometimes, increasingly often, she is back in that place, hiding.
Cowering.
A ghost of a version of herself that she thought she had buried with him
All those years ago in the woods behind her house
As Real Fergus cleaned the blood spatters from his fur
And droplets from his curlicue whiskers.
Some things can never be forgiven.
Some things can never be forgotten.
She pets Fergus and smiles at the wallpaper.
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On the Apotheosis
of Warrior Queen
Midnight Zenobia Meeps
who yowls goodbye
to Amazon box-wrapped
stroppy sleeps,
curls her tail around the pinhead
evening star – surveys
the garden wall,
the ambulance, the vast estate,
the fox, the drizzly gods –
and conquering all,
she leaps.
by C.P. Nield
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Rambo's Last Stand
You arrived the week the first husband left.
‘No cats, bread bins, toasters or pierced ears’
he’d decreed.
You knew you were a muscle bound 80s action hero
so we called you Rambo.
We saw a tiny ball of fluff who soaked up our grief
with robust antics.
You celebrated your first day by peeing on the air bed
blown up for a visiting relative.
‘Counter irritant’ she said nodding with approval.
You threw up on the essay of the second husband
within minutes of him finishing it.
He raged and tried to be fierce.
‘I will dance on your grave’
was the worst he could come up with.
You took over security when we went to live in the country
and moved outside.
With 22 cats living next door you knew
we needed vigilant protection.
When your time came you refused to surrender.
You stopped the 22 next door from eating their tea
so the neighbour came round to complain.
You’d created the role for yourself and starred in
Rambo’s Last Stand.
I took you home from the vet on the bus in a shopping bag
secretly hoping a small boy would sit next to me
so I could say
‘Would you like to see a dead cat?’
You would have approved but none obliged.
We buried you under the aspen tree by the stream
where you’d tormented the sedge warblers.
While we wept
he danced reverently
in silence
on your grave.
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Prestonpans Scotland July 27th 2004: The Baron Courts of Prestoungrange and Dolphinstoun grant an Absolute Pardon to those persons convicted of ‘conjuration or sorcery’ within their jurisdiction before the enactment of The Witchcraft Act 1735 as well as to the cats concerned.
To the Cats Concerned
And how they were feared, those creatures
Wild, defiant, unrepentant,
Roaming afar in fields and woods,
Untameable, impenitent.
Brewing strange stews, stirring trouble,
Feline fiends mewing at their feet.
Shape-shifters, such wicked women,
Suckling Satan with their third teats.
Plotting, preparing their potions,
Conjuring in darkness, hidden,
Raising storms, ruining harvests,
Taking the village’s children.
Dragged out of their homes by their hair,
Nail-scratched to draw out tainted blood
Pin -pricked to find the devil’s mark -
How the righteous unleashed the flood.
Thumbs screwed, bridles bound across chins,
Bits thrust in mouths to flatten tongues.
Silenced, strangled, suffocated,
Protests unheard, voices unsung.
Women and cats, heads held under
Freezing waters of Scottish burns,
Or staked on pyres stoked with the fear
Of witnesses who watch and learn.
Flames flicker, licking and feet and fur,
Rising fast, faster - so fast that
They do not know if the shrieking cries
Come from woman or come from cat.
by Lisette Abrahams
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The judges' decision is final. All entries were anonymised and read 'blind' by both judges. All work appears here by permission of the poets and must not be reproduced without permission.
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