2025 Third Prize: 'dead cat taught me displacement' by Luke Horsey

dead cat taught me displacement

when I woke up that Sunday morning
to you sprawled out lifeless
on that kitschy sixties carpet in our little bungalow
I told myself you could easily have been
a rockstar’s fur coat strewn out
on some funky futon backstage in a San Francisco club
like a groupie’s wet dream

I was not so glamorous. but like a groupie, I was deluded
I told myself you were just asleep, despite the tumour I knew was growing inside you
just like how we were all asleep at that point, cozy with the illness
tingling in our tummies. and I can bet you
I was cozy with stories about crushes, or busy
devouring daydreams in the next room
whilst you spasmed sporadically in the hallway

and so when my sister screamed at the touch of your
cold, stiff body that I’d stepped right over
it was decided you weren’t asleep anymore
and we bunged you in an cardboard box
and drove into the country
to have your body burnt by someone else
a basic service, of course

we stood in the aisles of B&M, laughing
coordinating a clumsy dance around the big dead elephant, there in the next room
who was probably just asleep
because we don’t really do death in this family
stiff upper lip and all that, whilst we’re
pondering on driving down to Wood Green to get another you
and I realised then that this is what we do

I was playing ROBLOX through my parents’ divorce
I soared above slamming doors in my Harrier jump jet
and as the Grenfell Tower burnt
we wore first generation AirPods. it’s a beautifully British thing
to drown the grief in lukewarm tea and
take the batteries out of scales and
tell yourself the lifeless cat with the tumour in the hallway is just blissfully asleep

so a dead cat taught me displacement
I stepped over a dead cat at thirteen
then stepped under a cigarette at seventeen
to let the ash of its lustrous lies sprinkle atop me like Christmas snow
it’d be fair to say I displaced everything from then on
but no one’s ever really dead
when you’re buying knick-knacks in B&M

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Dead Cat Poetry Prize - winners and commendees, 2025

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Luke Horsey is an MA French & Music student at the University of Glasgow and an English tutor from Hertfordshire, England. His poetry often reflects on queer experience and psychoanalytic theory, and is conditioned by his experiences of growing up gay in a conservative town on the North London fringe as well as time spent as a student at Sorbonne Université, Paris.