The Marie Antoinettes
are fluffy, chatty, regal emissaries—affectionates at Petit Trianon yet prized as ratters at sea— disembarking ship, to await their absconding companion.
Regrettably, they must lose her, except in aroma— her violette des bois, smuggled to seed wet meadows
and proliferate the eastern coast. (Astonishing, isn’t it, to imagine the spendthrift queen settling in austere Wiscasset: remarrying a shipbuilder, dressing in calico?)
In sash attracting muslin robe, and radials of warmth, Antonia had made a world, cut off, for six Angora cats
now dispersed through docks and doorsteps, meeting tabbies, eating chipmunks. The half-dozen likely fled their own revolutionary felicide, for the fault of their privileges—
languishing on plush Bérgeres, and hunting harvest mice abed the fleur-de-Loys—when opulence is unappealing
but faithfulness innate. They miss the one they shadowed, but nouveau monde, nouveau vie. Le chat make bon ami before you know it. They get to work pioneering their American.
Note: Maine Coon cat legend holds that Marie Antoinette made plans to escape to Maine, in 1793, on Captain Clough’s ship, and sent ahead several of her Turkish Angora cats.
Amy Holman is the author of the poetry collections Captive (Saddle Road Press, 2023) and Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window (Somondoco Press, 2010), as well as four chapbooks, and a writer’s guide. Two flash have been accepted recently, creative nonfiction in Airplane Reading, and a story in -ette review. Poems from Captive are up at the anthology Poets for Science. Pine Hills Review posted a poem in early May.
She is one of the poetry editors at The Westchester Review, and writes about what kind of writing editors want for her monthly substack What Where: Literary Journals. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.