The Big Cats, Part IV

Tiger | Evgeny Turaev / Shutterstock

“The Big Cats” is a ten-part poetry cycle written and read by Val Vinokur and published weekly at Public Seminar. For more, read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, and Part X.

THE BIG CATS

IV.

The next season of the Future
has been cancelled. The producer
left the show to work on Tiger
King. The Past is unwatchable,
a show that was about Nothing,
while all the while Something or
Everything oozed and ciliated and
fermented and burst into the Present,
this day that won’t be seized, like a slippery
carp with clouded eyes. Tiger catches
Joe Exotic by the toe. He won’t run,
let him go. My mother said Bill Gates
is going to pick the very last one.
Eggs, butter, cheese, bread,
stick, stack, stone dead.