MORNING STARTS THE same way it always does: I push through the plastic flap and the outside air hits my face and it’s already warm, late-May warm, the kind that arrives before breakfast and doesn’t apologize. I find my spot on the second shelf. I can see everything from there. The yard. The tree line thick now with leaves. The patio chair where the cushions got left out again.
I wait.
Ollie shows up before I hear him. That’s the thing about Ollie, one second the patio is empty and then it isn’t. He’s just there, sitting on the flagstone like he pays property taxes, grooming his ear with a paw. Dark gray in the morning light. He doesn’t look at me right away. He makes me wait. I hate that I find this interesting.
He comes to the mesh eventually. We do the thing where we press our noses almost to the same spot and breathe. He smells like outside, like cut grass and something dead in the neighbor’s yard, like a life I don’t have and honestly I’m not sure I want. He says something with a low growl that I don't catch and bats at the wire. I bat back. Neither of us catches anything. That’s not the point.
Nobby arrives later, slower, his three legs working through some private calculation the rest of us don’t need to make. He doesn’t do the nose thing. He just finds the lounge chair and settles. Sometimes I watch him sleep and think about the math of it; how he figured out a whole different way to land, to run, to sit. He’s been doing it so long it doesn’t look like a workaround anymore. It just looks like him.
Afternoon. The heat comes down hard through the screen roof and everything slows. Ollie stretches out on the same lounge chair, and Nobby shifts to give him room, and I’m up here on my shelf watching them breathe in and out together, their sides rising, and I think—I don’t know what I think. Something about how the wire is there and it’s fine. I have my shelves. I have my cat door. I go back inside where it’s cool and eat and come back out and they’re still there, just existing, and I sit with them through the mesh and we don’t talk, which is, I’ve found, the best kind of talking.
Evening pulls the light off the yard slowly, slower than it did in March, the sun taking its time. Birds go loud in the trees and then go quiet. Nobby leaves first without ceremony. Ollie stays until the porch light clicks on, then drops off the chair, sits and cleans his front paws and face, and disappears around the corner, into the thicket of butterfly weed. I stay a little longer. I look at where they were. The chair cushion still has the dent from Nobby’s hip. The flagstone holds the day’s heat where Ollie sat cleaning.
I go back inside. I’ll be here tomorrow.
Author’s Note
This one started with my phone camera and two cats who don’t belong to me.
Jake is our indoor cat. He goes outside only through a cat door into a wire-enclosed catio attached to the house—his own small kingdom of shelves and fresh air, safe from everything the yard might throw at him. Somewhere along the way, two neighborhood cats from the same household discovered him. Ollie, a gray tuxedo, and later, Nobby, an orange tabby, who gets around on three legs with a matter-of-factness that still stops me cold. Now they both come regularly, rain or shine, because the catio sits under our covered patio.
The prose poem is Jake’s—his vantage point, his second shelf, his version of what friendship looks like from behind a wire. I gave him a dry interior voice because that felt right. Cats don’t editorialize. They observe, they wait, they come back.
The season matters. Late May into early June, the yard full and warm, the light staying long into the evening; it changes the whole texture of a day.
That’s what I was after, anyway.
Upcoming…
Two poems about love and memories:
FLYING, STARTLED, 13 June 2026
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