StarCat/CatStar

Mechanically she works her beat,
turns and returns to the same spot
as if some program permits her
just this distance and no more;
as if invisible bars cage her.
Her gaze, focused on an inner world
slides over faces sightlessly
like the eyes of an ancient statue
empty beyond even death.
Her husband waits at home.
Warren
Sunday afternoons he’d bang on our door
Lend us twenty bucks, she won’t get up
and he was off to score a whack,
just to get her moving.
She used to be pretty. Not any more.
It was hard to watch
even when I didn’t really know them.
She could have been my sister.
He robbed someone, bought tickets
to Lebanon, We’ll make big bucks there,
they’ll love you but cashed them in to score
before the plane was due to leave. Someone saw
his picture on a police station
poster. Wanted. For robbery
though, not murder.
She was just another
dead junkie.
Author bio: Mercedes Webb-Pullman graduated from IIML Victoria
University Wellington with MA in Creative Writing in 2011. Her poems,
prose and short stories have appeared online and in print, in Turbine, 4th
Floor, Swamp, Reconfigurations, The Electronic Bridge, poetryrepairs,
Connotations, The Red Room, Silver Birch Press, Otoliths,
Cliterature among others, and in her books. She lives on the Kapiti Coast,
New Zealand.