The Stray

A stray woman lives under my porch: 

warm with the soil and the wet wood smells, curled into her dirty skin collecting a naked knotty look glue-twigs and strips of meat for hair, she bites and growls and scratches at me and eats the rodents out of my yard, her eyes glaring yellow when I bend down to see how she is doing under there or to leave her some leftover food pieces 

she sneaks inside on cold days creeps through an open window and chews on my shoelaces with the closet man, digs in my garbage my dirty underwear my paintings of the sky, she urinates in my doorways in corners, I try sending her away but she keeps coming back, I am becoming more and more her home 

my neighbor tells me to call the animal control center told me to have them take her put her to sleep, tells me she is no good and probably diseased or infested with bugs, but she has become apart of my life like that tree painted orange that hole in the road 

and one night she is in heat, gripe-whining and howling at me, not silencing until I allow her into my bed, allow her to satisfy her animal ways, her bites and growls and scratches at me, her lower muscles tight around me 

and once warm times come, she leaves my bed, leaves it muddy and torn and sweaty-stained, goes back under the porch of spider web wonders, curled in wet warming, and waiting for her next litter . . .