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Cat in Quarantine
Michael Salcman

Claude loves tomato sauce on pasta
though not lasagna
unlike that fat cat in the comics.
Claude eats dry cat chow only
when he wants to.
You might say he’s spoiled.
Claude loves to eat what we eat
and when we eat it:
milk from a cereal bowl,
chicken, sirloin, sometimes fish,
and popcorn only when I throw it
letting him bat it from paw to paw
as if each kernel was a field mouse
recently caught, hockey puck
or laser light
before licking the salt and crushing it
with his teeth.
Claude does not floss or use Water Pik.
He likes to lick watermelon slices.

As the months pass, there are changes:
Claude no longer follows me up the stairs
but dozes instead on the kitchen island
in an especially soft circular bed
designed to avoid irritation
of his neck hairs.
Claude now prefers to stand
at the toilet bowl
in the powder room disdaining
his automated water fountain.
During a check up at the vet
assistants fight for the privilege
of holding him for a weight check
and discover more Claude than before
from eight-point-two to ten-point-two
or twenty-five percent.
It’s not all fur or fair.
The cat and his staff must go on a diet.

—
Michael Salcman, poet, physician, and art historian, was chairman of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum. Poems appear in Arts & Letters, The Cafe Review, Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, New Letters, and Poet Lore. Books include The Clock Made of Confetti, The Enemy of Good Is Better, Poetry in Medicine (his popular anthology of classic and contemporary poems on doctors, patients, illness, and healing), A Prague Spring, Before & After (winner of the Sinclair Poetry Prize), and Shades & Graces (the inaugural winner of The Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize, published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2020). Necessary Speech: New & Selected Poems, also from Spuyten Duyvil, appeared in early 2022.

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