Adam Patric Miller: October 14

is a Tuesday
and the cat I write about
our gray cat
he feels the cold so
last night he got inside
climbed on our bed
and passed out
which is fine
because we’re out of the smaller
bed since we moved into
our concrete and steel home
the one planned by
the architect of Fallingwater
the one that sends wolves
from that story
packing…huff and puff
all you like

so the cat purrs in my ear
at 4:12 a.m.
so out he goes but it’s
Tuesday, October 14
so back in our warm bed
I can’t sleep
my right eye hurts
I realize I’ve got
professional obligations
I’ve put off…so I get up
into the dark again

October at this point
is fat as a pumpkin
at 6:24 a.m. the cat I write about
is on the oval multi-color rug
he’s become a motif centered
on a motif

I got my haircut yesterday
October 13, at Great Clips
and my hair was cut by a woman
named Faith whose mom taught
for thirty years and retired but she
keeps taking courses, keeps learning
she deforests my eyebrows
and makes me presentable
to a criminal world where children
are wrapped, dead, in white
and put in a row. they’d been playing
soccer in the rubble of Gaza

I walk for miles at night
arguing with a half-century old friend
who talks about the Middle East
like it’s a problem to be solved
he knows a British military analyst
he says, and I know this is the end
of our discussion. I was raised, you see
by a man who knew war wasn’t
tactical. I grew up distrusting
the equation makers, even though
for example, I learned something
about looking at a painting from my
old friend who will tell you
what was happening to Jews in
1324 but keeps a brain away from
what’s happening each day
in October of 2025. he started to quote
at me the atrocities of October 7
the hours of footage of atrocities
but he could not hold in his mind
both parts of the equation
and started to mumble about
the Cherokee on the open plains
that the United States, well,
how it came to be,
was not automatically founded
on genocide. I kept walking
as he talked, walked past the road
construction with its heaping
piles of gravel and realized the
air was thick with dust.
I couldn’t breathe.

—–

Copyright 2025 Adam Patric Miller

Adam Patric Miller has taught high school for 25 years in three states and currently teaches in St. Louis. He is the author of the book A Greater Monster, a collection of essays selected by Phillip Lopate to win the Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize. He’s won a Pushcart Prize and a Notable Essay Selection in The Best American Essay Series. Miller’s work has appeared in Agni Magazine, The Florida Review, Diagram, The Brevity Blog, The Normal School, and Vox Populi. New poems are forthcoming from Divagations. His op-eds have appeared nationally in over 200 media outlets.