Nine Lives: A Question
To consider everyone’s attendance
during my incident, the whereabouts
of my two feline housemates
comes into question.
Perhaps,
pushed to the basement
by my shrieks and pleas, they quietly braced
their quivering frames against
one another.
Perhaps,
drawn by the smell
of fresh blood, they paced hungrily
along the edge
of the dog-chewed rug.
Perhaps,
sitting patiently
by the kitchen, they conjured
a spell, like the mystic familiars
of their ancestry. Whiskers touching,
eyes midnight with dark magic, they forged
a new life, a cat-life, one of their nine
lives, and they blessed it onto
my broken body.
Perhaps,
I have the spirited grace
and luck of feline fortitude,
by which Death
is so easily eluded.
Perhaps,
I shouldn’t question it
because curiosity killed
the cat,
you know.
…..
This poem is from the chapbook Post-Traumatic Poetry (Finishing Line Press), and is available at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/post-traumatic-poetry-by-mackenzie-rose/
Post-Traumatic Poetry is at once deeply personal and frighteningly universal. Mackenzie Rose‘s collection of poems shares her story from being a young woman in an abusive relationship to becoming a domestic violence survivor. Her poems take the reader through her first glimpses of her partner’s narcissism and gas-lighting to the moment he tried to kill her. They untangle her medical trauma and find her traversing the world with a new identity while learning to understand her physical and emotional scars.
Mackenzie Rose is a survivor. On August 26, 2017, only two days after her 28th birthday, the man with whom she shared a home plunged a chef’s knife into her throat, past her tongue, and through the roof of her mouth. After eight days of recovery in the hospital, Mackenzie re-entered the world with a limited ability to speak, a PEG feeding tube, and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). After relentless therapies, she began to reclaim some semblance of normality and retrained her voice to carry her new narrative. Mackenzie is a professor of Communications and English at Shenandoah University and a PhD student of trauma studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She can be found speaking at public functions about destigmatizing trauma.
With her dog, Bertie, Mackenzie Rose frequently escapes to the beautiful wilderness of the Shenandoah National Park to recharge and find peace in Nature’s healing qualities.
For more information, please visit rosestorytelling.com.
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