I cleared a spot off one of my bookshelves for my brother’s kitty, Miike. She seems to enjoy the perch. In this shot she’s checking out that box set of Henry Miller there by her feet. If she’s anything like me, she liked Black Spring more than either of those two famous Tropics. Usually she doesn’t talk much about literature, but this afternoon while I flipped through Ander Monson’s Vacationland, she curled up on my lap and encouraged me to read aloud.

The cats trail like wedding bands
behind the boys who sell what they call
spare blood in jars and their compelling
stories of salt and postage.
We spend recent evenings in complacence
and ambivalence, not worrying the season out
but enduring its remainder.

-from Monson’s poem “Things Are Not As Bad As They Seem”