needles in hard-boiled eggs

By Kaothar Kadir

she’s slim, small but fierce. and she’s seen
her nine chicks out of the pouring mid-October
rain, the one that tears the roofs off of buildings 
like i tear off the top of a loaf of warm bread. she’s 
seen them out the rare hawk that roams and steals 
chicks away in blue light of the cloudless afternoon. 

but she hasn’t seen them out of you. 
wild, stealth, steel, juvenile, all pounce and fangs.
today there are eight, tomorrow seven, the day after,
four. you’ve gotten greedy.

how to kill a stray cat? its dreary.
you launch chicken eggs into a pot of hot 
water. then with a feline precision, you
arm them with claws. and they eat up the
pins oh so willingly. line them up, white and 
shiny in the moonlight. their task tonight, is 
to guard the chicks. 

you swallow them whole, two in one night.
you find that you prefer the featherless to the 
innocently alive. you find your purpose in 
the meal, and the soldiers find their purpose 
in rotting you from the inside. 

Kaothar Kadir is a twenty-one year old poet living in Nigeria. She began writing poetry at the age of seven. She was shortlisted in the Nigerian Students Poetry Prize in 2022.  She’s currently in her final year of pursuing a bachelor’s degree in History and International Studies in the University of Ilorin. And when she’s not bent over her laptop writing, she can be found reading (or rereading) a book, watching A24 movies or dancing to her self-curated Spotify playlists.