In “Calling the Vet,” a litter of kittens is found in a hearse, already cursed from the start. The speaker and someone else take them in, bottle-feed them, and hope to be healers, but the weakest die before they are even named. One kitten, chosen and wrapped like a gift in a cardboard box, is buried under mud in the front yard. The poem mixes warm domestic details—blankets, formula, a heated kitchen—with funeral imagery like the hearse and coffin, so the rescue feels like a deathwatch from the outset. The mood is tender but guilty: the speaker imagines the mother cat returning to find her litter stolen and calls the rescuers “kidnappers with sympathy.” The repetition of “Of course they were doomed” turns care into grief, and the ending suggests the people are not saviors but “dictators of soil,” doomed themselves to keep burying whatever they try to touch.
Calling the Vet — Summary
Of course they were doomed, born with a curse; the whole litter mewing, cradled by the torn out seat-stuffing in a hearse on flat tires. Of course we took them; a chance to be gods and healers, our internal boggle turning like mileage to spell "Mom."
We boxed them on blankets and sweatshirts, fixed a water teat to the side within reach, administered formula feedings in a warm kitchen none of it mattered. The weak ones died before the debate on names.
She was soggy-faced, her prize pick wrapped in a cardboard coffin box like a Christmas gift. It weighed less than a Beanie Baby, its yellow eyes shut beneath stuffed animal fur for always. I dug a hole out front with a stone and tucked the box under heavy mud clumps, then smoothed it over.
I bet their mother was out hunting when we stole them; kidnappers with sympathy hemorrhaging from our heads, visions of us in stride with nature We, the dictators of soil, the taxidermists asleep under sewn sacks of stolen feathers.
The door opening on our shoebox ambulance sings a corrugated dirge. With one arm like a sickle, the other a shovel, doomed to bury everything we've touched. Of course they were.