News Story
I saw a news story: three young girls, shoplifters, caught.
Wanting is not a crime.
I would steal anything I could,
at sixteen—eyeliner, candy, homework,
boyfriends. I helped steal
a toilet from a construction site,
and I kissed a boy I didn’t know
that night. Who knows who
he belonged to? I owned nothing. Even my shoes
came from my best friend’s closet.
At least I come by stealing honestly. My father
took things from the neighbor’s
yards to sell. He took
gas from their cars, even took
money from my grandmother’s purse. Stealing
is in my blood, my birthright. When I was a teen,
I downloaded a credit card
generator, typed in the numbers of each card
until one of them worked. I bought clothes,
CDs, and once I bought cans of duck
because I had never
tried it before (too oily). Even now,
I’m eying my neighbor’s dog—alone
on their porch all day,
and I have to remind myself
that I can buy
what I don’t have already.
Now I’m thinking:
what must it be like
to be an honest girl?
Cat Guide
Some people say cats can
speak with the dead, and you know
it’s true. We’ve all seen a cat
communing with a spirit in the corner
of the room, ears pointed forward,
puffed tail. When my grandmother died,
all I had around were
my uncle’s dogs bumping my hand
for pets, lying at my feet,
following me to bed—loving companions,
but when my father died,
my cat ran around my apartment,
mad, full of my grief, wailing, possessed,
and then suddenly she stopped cold, and I caught her
looking up at the ceiling, expectant, waiting.
Erin Carlyle is a poet living in Atlanta, Georgia. Her work can be found in journals such as Tupelo Quarterly, Ruminate, Arts and Letters, Jet Fuel, and Prairie Schooner. Her debut full-length poetry collection, Magnolia Canopy Otherworld, 2020, was published on Driftwood Press. She is currently the Production Editor at New South. In addition she is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing with an emphasis on poetry at Georgia State University.