“Petites Dents, Petites Pattes” by Thom Ward

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Etcetera's MistressThe language has always been smarter than us.
It slinks, pounces on invisible mice. Waits
by the bowl just recently filled, looks up
and stares through you—its tail curling
into a question mark. Each moment
another chance to nap, for it to assume
what it rests upon. Or so you think. And
who can think beyond the language?
Who doesn’t yearn to say—cat—without
the cat itself? Go ahead, keep collecting
those pieces of yarn, rubber-squeak toys,
keep changing that litter box. No doubt,
your god is a stranger. How quickly
cat disappears when the stranger arrives.

–Thom Ward,
Etcetera’s Mistress
Accents Publishing

Thom WardThom Ward is sole proprietor of Thom Ward’s Poetry Editing and Proofreading Services. Ward’s poetry collections include Small Boat with Oars of Different Size (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000) and Various Orbits (Carnegie Mellon, 2004). Ward’s poetry chapbook, Tumblekid, winner of the 1998 Devil’s Millhopper poetry contest, was published by the University of South Carolina-Aiken in 2000. His collection of prose poems, The Matter of the Casket, was published by CustomWords in 2007. Ward teaches creative writing workshops at high schools and colleges around the country, tutors individual poetry students, and edits poetry manuscripts. He is a faculty and advisory board member at Wilkes University’s Graduate Creative Writing program in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Thom Ward lives in western New York with his girlfriend Jennifer and their cat Phantom.

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