She's not ours, but we feed her

“she’s not ours, but we feed her”
my words trip out, leaning
laden with optionality
a clumsy, controlled fall of English
caught out, careening
off-balance, into Spanish
conflicted and unaware

“the little girl destroyed the netting”
¿la niña?
callejera, gatita
his hands cup
and drag, up
lift at the knuckle
animated by unseen strings
approximate claws pause at the top
then leap, out of body
mime-shredding, universal rip and tear

flash back
days ago
a soft, familiar mewing
everywhere, distressed
all-at-once
a wavy ripple, back-bounding
hollow concrete channels
multiplied in empty evening resonance
elbows out and bouncing loose

an M18 wide-beam
lithium LED
floods the scene
with far too many lumens
scanning densely for the displaced
light and shadow dash
projecting sticky, thorn-loop silhouette outcasts
backsplash: bamboo and barbed wire
a hero’s emblem, thrown and scattered
signaling amorphous rescue plans

help, at last
a light telling
walls 12 feet high
the night felling
every slapdash plan, needs hard selling
“get the ladder”
“drape a blanket” over-thinking
“call the neighbor”
or “just climb in, anyway, she’s gone for the season”

hours pass
the building manager
lets us in
at last, there she is
our Conchita
centered, sitting behind panes of glass
floor-to-ceiling
community street cat, spade and all that
fed by no less than 10 of us
(and with as many names, I'd guess)
had used one ninth
of her many lives
getting trapped
in the neighbor’s chasmic patio

in desperate attempts to be free
she destroyed every sliding screen
climbing, Jet-Li unleashed
scrambling every surface for purchase
until we came to set her free

the building manager looks at me
“not yours…but you feed her…”
OK
I’ll pay the fee.

When a cat showed up at our door in Mexico, we asked everyone in the neighborhood who she belonged to. We posted photos and housed her for weeks while looking for her owner. We took her to the vet to ensure she was spayed and gave her a flea treatment. It turned out she was already spayed, and they didn’t find out until she was in surgery due to her scars being hidden and her ear not being clipped (to signal that a stray cat spayed). This led us to believe she was not a stray and belonged to someone, so we did not intend to keep her forever.

After much searching and asking the neighborhood, we found out she was The Community Cat, bouncing between houses being fed, living outside during the day and choosing a home to be fed in at night. Everyone seemed to like this arrangement, and I felt a little naive and precious trying to “save her” from the streets or find her owner (maybe she had one at one point, but we won’t know). Coming from the suburbs in America, living in different countries can challenge a lot of your assumptions. We’ve since seen this in Italy with a wooden cat house in our local park, where people come to visit the few cats that roam and build little shrines for them. Litter boxes are in the apartment hallways, and there’s a sense of everyone (cats included) enjoying company at a distance. It’s easy to project morals or ownership onto the situation, or tell origin stories about the cats and how they were abandoned on the street (or are “feral”) but really, we have no idea. We just tried to do right by the Cat Distribution System in the moment (feeding her, taking her to the vet to ensure she was healthy and spayed, bathing her, housing her while we looked for her family).

If you read this far, some tips are that spayed cats have their ears clipped, so you can tell at a distance (while she was already spayed, her ear was not clipped, so the vet did this to prevent confusion for people going forward). Also, you can transport cats in a pillow case (as a last resort) if you do not have an expensive carrier and need to, in an emergency. We ended up buying supplies (and a carrier) to care for her while we thought we were getting her spayed or reunited with her family.

We chose not to keep her as a family pet for personal reasons (allergies, the fact that we were moving countries the month after she came to our door). One day we saw her being fed by a new family, who likely gave her a new name. I’m not sure how it all works, but I felt responsible for her during those few weeks, and we saved her when she was trapped and crying out in an enclosed yard (thankfully she was uninjured). This poem is dedicated to our little Conchita, and all the fleeting interactions we have with the Cat Distribution System. We miss her. And yes, we offered to pay for the damage she did trying to escape being trapped in our neighbor’s back yard. After all, the universe delivered her to our door, and we did feed her.