Poetry by Cat Hubka

                                                                        The Sum of Outrage
 
                                                                        A man has been taken into custody in connection with a
                                                                        road rage incident that left a 4- year-old girl dead, police in
                                                                        Albuquerque, New Mexico, said Wednesday.
                                                                        ⎯ CNN, Wed October 21, 2015
 
 
 
One       highway         one car            one lane     one      exit                   one truck
 
                one        man               one      father                       one child        a daughter
 
one gun               one    bullet               one           shot                       one                 head
 
 
               one                     brain                       one    instant                             one      death
 
 
Add      them     up
    
                               to a      total     
                                                             loss
 
                                                             we     
                                                                                can    not     
 
 
                                                                                                               compute.     ​




Recovery Rounder
 
 
When he was twelve, the headmaster expelled him
and his mom threw him out in the maritime snow.
 
He took to bumming rides on the Trans-Canada Highway,
his thumb frozen stiff, poised in the wind waiting
 
for strangers. Sometimes cars stopped, a rig, or pick up,
Where ya going, eh? They asked. Wherever, he said
 
but they dropped him off to root through dumpsters
and when he was older,  strong-arm convenience stores
 
in Saskatoon, Banff, or Kamloops. Sometimes women
took him home, patting his head like a puppy they found
 
on the side of the road. There was Wendy, Susie, Jessie,
and Fran, but he resisted commitment so all kicked
 
him out. Then he slept on benches in parks or bus stations
and sold his body to men in washroom stalls. When he quit
 
drinking, he married a nurse and they lived in a travel trailer
and he preached the Big Book in AA meetings all over. I met
 
him in Tucson while he changed his oil, draining brownish
sludge on the Arizona sand. That’s illegal, I said, and he laughed.
 
Are you fuckin’ kidding me, Kid? And the desert drank
the forty weight inkblot, soiled the color of bathroom tiles.

​


Haunting Mom
 
My mom is haunted. She walks
with ghosts I call woulda, coulda,
and shoulda but she calls them regrets.
 
I tell her there’s nothing
she could or should have done,
I tell her there’s nothing
that would have made
 
a difference. But you know
moms, they worry. She wants
to know the last thing I thought
 
before the gun went off and lead
pierced my skull and scattered
my brain. She thinks about the bullet
boring through my head.
 
She’s obsessed with knowing
if I suffered so I told her:
 
It was  ⎯ Crack ⎯Bang
no time for my ears to ring⎯
just exploded light all around.

​

Bio: Cat just received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of New Mexico in May. She’s had poems and essays published in several literary journals and was the Nonfiction Editor for Blue Mesa Review. Right now, she’s revising her manuscript and recovering from grad school.

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