Et moi, contre toutes les apparences, je ne suis pas un professionnel

My poem "A Gun and a Boy (Le Cercle Rouge)" is now online at inkscrawl. The issue's theme is "Living Bodies in Motion," guest-edited once again by Bogi Takács; contributors include MJ Cunniff, S. Qiouyi Lu, Mary Alexandra Agner, Naru Dames Sundar, Holly Day, Sheree Renée Thomas, Na'amen Gobert Tilahun, and all sorts of other moving wordsmiths. My poem was inspired by Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 film of the same name, which I saw around this time last year at the HFA. The title adapts Jean-Luc Godard's possibly apocryphal dictum, "All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl."

Far too much of today was spent between the dentist's office and packing boxes, but at least the evening went toward rushthatspeaks' birthday party. They screened Ulrike Ottinger's Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia (1989) in the Somerville Theatre's Microcinema and provided dangerously chocolate cake at intermission. I brought them a small jar of white sturgeon caviar because no one should have to listen to the transcendent spiel about zakuski delivered by Peter Kern's Mickey Katz without having at least a little of the same on hand. I like that movie so much. The last time I saw it was in 2009 and while I had remembered accurately most of the shamanism, romance, and register-shifting, I had forgotten just how much of the first half could be tagged "I Love Everybody in This Queer Yiddish Theater Party." I wish there were a recording of the soundtrack in all its languages.

Tomorrow, moving.

He's locked in my bedroom with a vacuum-powered beauty machine

I have belled the cats.

Actually I have just put collars on them: a green one for Autolycus and his eyes, which are mostly lime-gold now, but sometimes still the celadon of his kittenhood, a red one for Hestia in honor of her third namesake, Jenny Linsky, "the little black cat with the red scarf." This was last tried when they were kittens; it ended badly. Hestia threw herself to the ground in an immobilizing freakout and tried to chew off her own neck fur while Autolycus trotted happily around the house until he got the plastic breakaway buckle stuck between his jaws and then he bolted through my room crying and coughing and clawing at me in terror when I caught him and tried to break the collar free. (Eventually I pinned him between my knees and then spent a long time afterward reassuring him that the collar was gone and he was safe, but it remains probably the most frightening moment I have ever had with him. The time he fell in the toilet was potentially a disaster, because he was small enough at the time that he couldn't get out on his own, but since it ended well the humor value was higher.) This time Autolycus barely flicked an ear even though the circumference of his collar required adjusting and Hestia was first soothed with petting and afterward frankly bribed with the catnip feather and it is true that she devised a way to remove her own collar—by paw—within the first fifteen minutes, but she also did not claw me when I fastened it firmly back on. It feels very strange to me to have collars on them. They have always been little wild things which live with us. But since they will be spending the next two weeks on a ground floor with an exit route directly to the outside, I don't care that the door will be locked and off limits during their tenure, I don't want to take any chances. They are too important to be lost.

But right now they look a bit like Christmas decorations and it's way too early in the year. [edit] As we were preparing to take the last load of stuff for the night down to the car, derspatchel asked me to double-check that both cats were in view and I dutifully read off, "Red cat, green cat," and then, automatically, "Port cat, starboard cat."–"See?" Rob said. "They weren't Christmas lights all along, they were ship lights!"