My Cat Has Opinions About My Drafts
She sits only on the bad pages, with terrifying accuracy.
My cat has rejected more of my poems than any literary magazine, and unlike the magazines, she has never once included an encouraging note.
Her name is Biscuit. She is nine years old, gray, roughly the shape of a loaf of bread that has given up, and she has been editing my work without my consent since 2019. Her method is simple. I print my drafts and lay them out on the bed, because I am the kind of writer who needs to see pages physically, spread out like evidence at a crime scene.
Biscuit surveys the spread from the doorway with the cold eye of a health inspector. Then she walks across the bed, chooses one page, and sits on it.
Only one... Always with her whole body, tail wrapped, eyes closed, radiating the profound peace of a creature who has just made someone else's problem worse.
For the first year I thought it was random. Cats sit on paper. Cats sit on laptops, laundry, the exact section of newspaper you are reading. This is settled science. I would slide the page out from under her, smooth the fur off it, and think nothing.
Then came the night of the sonnet.
I had written a sonnet for a contest deadline, and I was proud of it in the specific way you are proud of a poem at 1 a.m. that you will be embarrassed by at 9. Fourteen lines about the ocean. It had the word "cerulean" in it. It rhymed "heart" with "apart," a crime I was fully prepared to commit in public. I printed six drafts of various poems that night, laid them out, and went to brush my teeth.
When I came back, Biscuit was sitting on the sonnet. Dead center. She had walked past five other pages, including one that was mostly blank, which any reasonable cat would prefer, and planted herself on cerulean like she was extinguishing a small fire.
"Get off," I said.
She did not get off. She looked at me with the expression cats reserve for furniture that has started talking.
I retrieved the sonnet, read it again in the bathroom light, and felt the 9 a.m. embarrassment arrive eight hours early.
The poem was terrible.
Not broken, worse: polished and empty, the kind of poem that says nothing beautifully. I did not send it anywhere. Biscuit received no thanks and wanted none.
A coincidence, obviously. So, because I have a graduate degree and no sense of proportion, I designed an experiment.
I printed eight pages. Four were poems of mine, ranging from "honest and scary to have written" to "technically words." Two were decoys: a grocery list formatted in stanzas, and a page of a cereal box copied out in Garamond. One was a poem by an actual great poet, typed out, to test for taste. One was blank, the control group.
I shuffled them and dealt them onto the bed face up like a tarot spread, then sat in the reading chair with a notebook, fully aware that I was a grown man conducting a peer review with an animal that drinks from the toilet.
Biscuit entered. Surveyed... Walked the grid.
She sat on my most recent poem, the one I had that morning described to my sister as "pretty good, actually."
Not the cereal box... Not the blank page... Not the great poet, whom she stepped over with visible respect.
Mine. The pretty good one.
I ran the experiment five more times over two weeks, reshuffling, varying the layout, moving to different rooms like we were touring. Her hit rate on my weakest page was, and I say this with the flat calm of a man describing something that frightens him... five out of six.
My wife's theory was heat: fresh printer pages are warm. Except I started printing everything the night before, all pages equally cold by morning, and Biscuit's aim did not waver.
My sister's theory was that I subconsciously placed my bad poems in Biscuit's favorite spots, which would still mean some part of me knew which poems were bad and had chosen to route that information through a cat.
Honestly... that theory holds up.
Because here is what I eventually noticed about the pages she chose. They were never the messy ones. She never sat on the drafts full of crossings-out and arrows, the ones where I was still fighting. She sat on the finished-sounding ones. The tidy ones. The poems where I had stopped telling the truth and started performing it, where every line had been sanded until nothing could snag on anyone, including me. I read an essay once about why safe poems lose, how the polish is often just fear wearing a nice jacket, and I remember looking up from my screen directly at Biscuit, who was asleep on a villanelle about autumn that had no reason to exist.
She sat on everything I wrote to be admired, and spared everything I wrote because I had to.
The page she never touched was the one I was most afraid of.
I wrote it two winters ago, after a phone call with my father where we both said "anyway" a lot. It is not clever. It does not rhyme. It sits on the page like a chair with one short leg. It says a true thing about family that took me forty years and one bad phone call to say. It lived on the bed for a week among its doomed siblings, and Biscuit walked around it every single time, carefully, the way you walk around a person who is crying in a kitchen.
That was the poem I finally entered into a monthly poetry contest, mostly because I could no longer argue with the entire household.
It made the shortlist.
The email arrived on a Tuesday and I read it out loud to a cat, which is a sentence I am at peace with. She blinked slowly, which the internet assures me means love, and then she went and sat on the printed email, which I choose to interpret as her keeping me humble.
People ask if I really believe my cat can evaluate poetry. Of course not. She is a cat. She has eaten spiderwebs. What I believe is much stranger: that I already know which of my poems are dishonest the moment I print them, and that I need a nine-year-old loaf of gray fur to make the knowledge undeniable, because she cannot be argued with, flattered, or shown the good reviews.
Every writer needs one reader who cannot be impressed. Mine sheds.
These days the ritual is fixed. I print, I deal the pages onto the bed, I put the diary and pen on the nightstand, and I go make tea while the editor works. Sometimes I stand in the doorway and watch her choose, and there is a horrible suspense in it, like waiting for the last envelope at an awards show where the only category is Which Part of You Was Lying.
Last night she sat on stanza two of a new poem. Just stanza two: she draped herself precisely across the middle of the page and left the top and bottom clear, a level of editorial specificity we had not previously achieved.
I cut the stanza this morning.
The poem is better.
I am not going to tell her.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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