Dear John Roberts,
Last night, just before the ex-POTUS threatened another young woman on Truth Social,
my big gray long-haired cat, Cosmo, came back to visit me.
He’s been gone for five years, but every now and then, I find a bit of his dander
in the old rug’s nap, the one I use in the cellar now.
In the lowering light, I could just make out the shape of him:
athletic, Viking-like, thick-necked, a real jock.
He once wore the mantle Prince of Ruby Avenue:
all the other cats — Tiger, Boots, Alma, India — followed him.
Well, he’s a ghost now. Just like you.
No matter how hard he tries, his deep voice only stirs a moth or two on the screen—
and they don’t care or scare at all. They slip through his spirit-paws.
He, too, was all alone, run over by a fast car he never saw
racing down the road. Cosmo — named for the whole night sky
and the very last flower of the fall.
* * * * *
Dear Brett Kavanaugh,
Consider the kindness of the male seahorse
who carries 1500 eggs for over a month at a time
until he releases fully-formed babies, and then
he mates again. His genus is hippocampus, sea monster,
and he is shaped like the part of the brain that holds
all memory. Remember blackouts? I liked beer, too,
I liked it a lot, but is anything worse than a drunk woman?
I still use those big calendars, too: blocks of days on pages
held together with a tight coil. There’s something satisfying
and tactile about a pen X-ing out days, arrows piercing
through a whole week: EXAMS! BEACH WEEK! PARTY!
Long ago, before I got sober, I would mark an X
for each day of my period — just in case there was a night
when all I could remember was beer and laughter and lights.
* * * * *
Dear Amy Coney Barrett,
Have you ever wept when someone you don’t know is kind to you?
The nurse who held my hand during my second abortion
said the quick loss of pregnancy hormones could have caused my weeping.
The doctor had such smooth, dark skin and a pure white beard.
It was as if a waxing or waning moon hovered between my legs.
He was kind too and said, almost done, almost done. He sounded like the tide.
I did your chart: the Friday you were born, the moon was humped, gibbous.
Astronomers called it a moon giant.
Astrologers say you have great willpower, dislike almost every change.
You have the choice to show your love with actions.
When your moon is in Cancer, you have the choice to inflict great harm.
Amy, we were both born on Aquarian cusps, sharp points of a moon’s
crescent hook. I’m being very intrusive now, but under your black robe,
you should wear Aquarius blue; around your neck, a plum gemstone.
* * * * *
Dear Clarence Thomas,
I write about my cats too much, which means, I write about my father.
He hated cats, too. And pierced ears: as if the littlest birthstone studs
(a set for each of his daughters: pearl amethyst emerald)
implied a sexiness or an easiness or whatever they said about women
back then when we had a TV set in every room so no one
in our home ever spoke to each other. When I say
I loved my father, what I mean is: I have no other father. When I say,
I love my husband or my country: I have no other husband, no other country.
Sometimes, love like this is painful.
But I want to talk to you about loving Virginia, your wife,
because I think you do. And I think you talk about all sorts of things
after supper, over sweet Americanos, with the TV on low.
Justice, is love your stare decisis? My love has also prevailed:
me with all my cats and my earring holes sealed.
* * * * *
Dear Samuel Alito,
For decades, your tip-of-the-tongue face has bugged me:
and then I got it! You look like Milton Selzer!
Who is Milton Selzer? Remember on The Twilight Zone, he wore a mask
with a snout like a pig, and because of his unabashed greed,
his face molded into the pig’s, ugly as his soul? Milton was small,
a character actor in all those black and white shows, with a face
you’ve seen everywhere. In a Movie of the Week, he played a Puritan
in colonial Salem who ordered a woman to be laid out on a shorn field
and pressed to death under an old door upon which the villagers piled
stone after stone. She was demonic and he hunted her down
over his lifetime: devoted himself to her weighty destruction.
In this movie, Crowhaven Farm, his name was Dr. Terminer,
which was taken from the name of the court back then:
Oyer & Terminer, to hear & to determine all treasons & felonies.
* * * * *
Dear Neil Gorsuch,
The number one song on the day you were born was “Ode to Billie Joe.”
I remember Bobbie Gentry’s alto and how she rhymed (five times)
Choctaw Ridge with Tallahatchie Bridge. The song had lots and lots
of apostrophes: balin’, pickin’, nothin’ — a song full of little barbs,
hooks that scrape things away. I remember, too, the movie
with Robbie Benson. In this version, his Billie Joe
made love to a man, climbed up to Choctaw Ridge,
jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.
He had made love to a man because he wanted to.
He wanted to. Morning after, his shame was unbearable.
But isn’t this an old story? The sad gay person, the sad trans person, the sad
pregnant person whose circumstances are so awful, they must end it all.
Neil, what if we didn’t have to be sad about any of this?
What if we could sit somewhere high, droppin’ hellebore,
mugwort, thistle, blazin’ stars into the muddy waters?