The Familiar Familiar

A Spell for Summoning Forever Pets and Other Impossible Things

In the attic of my grief, where dust bunnies breed like real bunnies on Viagra,

I crack open a grimoire thick as a cat-scratched sofa, its pages sticky with the residue of wish fulfillment and tuna juice.

The candle I light is the color of your fur in that one dream where you were a celebrity weathercat,

predicting hairballs with 80% accuracy and looking fabulous in a tiny necktie.

.

I chant the spell, each word a fuzzy sock sliding down the laundry chute of my throat,

expecting you to materialize like a glitch in The Sims, all polygons and purrs.

Instead, the room fills with the ghosts of every lint roller I've ever owned,

their sticky sheets flapping uselessly against the void where you should be.

.

In the silence between one heartbeat and the next useless one,

I feel you not in the spell, not in the smoke, but in the muscles of my jaw

that remember the way I'd clench my teeth when you'd bring me "gifts" at 3 AM,

half-dead moths and fully-dead dignity wrapped in a bow of predatory pride.

.

The grimoire slams shut like a cat flap in a hurricane, 

but who needs medieval magic when I've got memory stronger than catnip?

You're here in the way I still step over nothing in the dark,

in how I whisper "pspspsps" at stray shadows and errant dust motes,

in the empty Amazon boxes I can't bear to throw away because they might contain quantum cats, 

simultaneously dead and alive and judging my life choices.

.

Oh familiar familiar, you've rewritten my personal grimoire,

each page now a snapshot of your whiskers twitching in disapproval at my dating history.

In the end, no spell can bring you back, but every spell I cast 

tastes of fur and claws and the particular way you'd look at me when I was being especially stupid,

which was often, and is now always, in this purgatory of perpetual paw prints on my heart.

---

This poem is for a word prompt -GRIMOIRE- for Halloween by Miguel S.

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