A stray cat appeared at our Spring Arbor home two years ago. He was a wet, bedraggled, and starving Maine Coon Cat. I'll never forget the look he gave when I peered down on him huddled in a corner outside our house. His expression said,  "I'm the saddest homeless cat you're ever going to see. I'm done. I quit."

Result #1

A stray cat appeared at our Spring Arbor home two years ago. He was a wet, bedraggled, and starving Maine Coon Cat. I'll never forget the look he gave when I peered down on him huddled in a corner outside our house. His expression said,  "I'm the saddest homeless cat you're ever going to see. I'm done. I quit." What a true-true cat! And what a heartbreaking real cat. More than a month later, I saw him again at the Senior League game against Ohio State. Felt, tape, and rocks were laid on top of him for a playoff celebration. A long-haired mascot named Mike lived in his den; Mike could easily brush his teeth. I wished I could play soccer with him. I wanted to play in the playoffs with him. Why he would abandon me forever, I still can't understand. The answers lay in an obscure school game he attended, and the actions he took immediately became a part of his personality. Such as his broken bat, made from a toy gun, that he used to smash at imaginary defenders. Or his many kisses. My parents took me to the game and sat with me, the cat and me, as I watched the game. After the game, I walked up to the stadium with the cat. He ran into me, up to me, and hugged me. I couldnt believe the truth I was seeing in the cat, as if I was a part of him. If I left him out in the cold, he would not respond to me; he would run out of the stadium and start a fire. He didnt care if I was going to hell, he said. He loved me and I loved him, and he loved us. He loved his play and love his friends.He loved everything in his life—toys, cars, girls, cats, dogs—and all he did was love. What I wouldnt get to do with a cat, I have to be able to do with a man. In the end, Mike was a real hero. The cat went off to meet him, and after the game, I gave him a pair of pink knee socks, a one-inch chain, and a big, stuffed lap dog. I loved him. Mike was a true hero, the best of the best.

Result #2

A stray cat appeared at our Spring Arbor home two years ago. He was a wet, bedraggled, and starving Maine Coon Cat. I'll never forget the look he gave when I peered down on him huddled in a corner outside our house. His expression said,  "I'm the saddest homeless cat you're ever going to see. I'm done. I quit." The poem was the wittiest thing Ive ever heard. I couldnt tell you where to look for the real homeless cat. A cat will appear on the doorstep and hang around, eating chips, drinking beer, crying. I spent the better part of the summer hiding in my closet, listening to him crack, muttering to myself, talking to myself. And then one day, just when I thought the cat was finally gone, a sharp-angled bullet rammed his head. My father called the accident a freak accident, and I think of the cat as a natural part of our everyday lives. The only thing I can really do is think about it and weep.Catworths poetry should be a complex analysis of the current social crisis. Like many of her contemporaries, her work focuses on the human condition—its abstractions and contradictions, its sadness and hope, its strange ways of life and love—and on the way humanity experiences itself. Although Catworth does not address the problem of homelessness directly, her poems convey the grief, frustration, and sadness of being trapped in a world that refuses to connect. For example, in the poem Her Bedfellows, 1989, she recounts her recent experience of being evicted from her apartment in Boston. She recounts how when she had to move out of the apartment she had lived in for almost a decade because her landlord, David, did not want to let her in, he threw her out of the apartment. While she was being evicted, I used to stare at the man who had thrown her out of the apartment and laugh. That was the last time I laughed. Catworths is a humor-driven, sarcastic, and unfailing understanding of the plight of homeless people.In Catworths installation, she takes us back to her youth in the Midwest.

Result #3

A stray cat appeared at our Spring Arbor home two years ago. He was a wet, bedraggled, and starving Maine Coon Cat. I'll never forget the look he gave when I peered down on him huddled in a corner outside our house. His expression said,  "I'm the saddest homeless cat you're ever going to see. I'm done. I quit." . . . I had to escape. Like so many homeless cats, he didnt make any friends in the neighborhood and no one seemed to give a damn if he left. So when I asked the animals life-size replica owner if he would keep the animal for me, he said,  Sure. When you leave a cat behind, you must make a lot of friends. So I put the animal on the couch and took him for a walk, staying for an hour every day for the duration of the exhibition. The new cats are as aloof as the original, and they never bark at me. One cat hides in his den like a wounded beast. Another always slinked away from me at night, very quietly, maybe as quietly as a cat might shed its coat. The first week, I spent almost no time at the exhibition, the other three weeks I spent cooking and cleaning the animal. . . . The cats new companion, the cats new owner, is constantly catching me in the act of loving him, and the new cat cannot go anywhere in the world without some kind of need, even an emergency, to be fed, watered, and groomed. This latter need may be what makes him so happy. His new pets make him happy, and they make him happy. He feels good in his new home. He loves his new job, he has new friends, and he feels happy.As though a warm spring breeze swept the stables up and down. A gas leak had been spotted, and the old cat seemed to be experiencing an entirely new, never-before-happened-to kind of cataloupe. The cat was literally streaming water through a hole in the wall. The new cat is a mighty big cat with a collection of sharp-eyed birds. (He even has the ability to mimic a bird before it can fly.) I think he feels better than ever.

Result #4

A stray cat appeared at our Spring Arbor home two years ago. He was a wet, bedraggled, and starving Maine Coon Cat. I'll never forget the look he gave when I peered down on him huddled in a corner outside our house. His expression said,  "I'm the saddest homeless cat you're ever going to see. I'm done. I quit." A short, wooden table was at our feet. Sitting on a workbench, a dollhouse, and a dresser, the three-legged beast was coated in paint. As if he could not believe that he had left his home and gotten this far, he started to cry. Me and my neighbor went to his house. My neighbor waited until the cat came home and sat on the couch and talked to him. I knew that was the only way to keep him from starving to death in the dog house. The cat knew he had done the right thing and left, the cat had never been afraid of us, and we were never going to lose him. We were just going to have to do what we had to do to keep him alive.We kept going to the house. The cats changed from wet to dry coats, brown to black, and finally to white, all at the same time. He learned to walk on a leash. When he fell down, he got up and ran into the yard. He made us jump out of bed. The cat loved to jump on the floor when we were sleeping. When I visited him that night, I kept the cat company by putting him to sleep on the back of my bed. Then he would run through the house, jump on the mattress, or lie on my bed. He would play with his favorite toy, the cat.When we first met the cat, he was living in a wardrobe. He was old and fat and dirty. Now he is calm, and very smart. It was a good thing that I had a cat to play with. One day, I just sat on the couch with him and watched him go through the house. He had no idea what to do with himself. He was the happiest cat Ive ever had in my life. I was so happy to have a cat that could have any personality at all.

Result #5

A stray cat appeared at our Spring Arbor home two years ago. He was a wet, bedraggled, and starving Maine Coon Cat. I'll never forget the look he gave when I peered down on him huddled in a corner outside our house. His expression said,  "I'm the saddest homeless cat you're ever going to see. I'm done. I quit." In the middle of the next room hung a half-dazed photo of the little feline, in his own voice, detailing how the cat abandoned the comer of life, unable to find his way. The feline seemed lost in a world that couldnt hold his tail, as if living on the verge of death. In the back room, the cat displayed his teeth. In its sleep, he slept on the floor, his body covered in dirt. In the background, a slide projector projected a video of the cat, in a hothouse.It took me some time to realize that the cat was a homeless cat, a feral one at that. The image—a friend of the artist describes the animal as a feral hound—was set in the basement of an abandoned house in the Maine town of Cherchester. The animal clearly identified with the townspeople, as did the cat, who was evidently living out its days in a hotel room. This unsettling portrait of a homeless cat was painted in a crayon and hung on a wall, as if it were a gift from a friend. It was obvious that the cat had experienced a distressing loss of identity; the animal in the video had his own house. The viewer was at once invited to enter the animals apartment and explore its contents. The cat stood beside the window, whose walls were stained red and painted a dirty brown. A second footage loop was projected on a wall in the corner of the room; it showed the cat perched on a stool outside the apartment, perhaps lying to rest on his catnip, a habit that he was helping himself to. On the floor next to the couch, a trashcan full of chips had been emptied out and placed on the floor. The squatters had taken up residence in the debris of a home, and were now occupying the furniture. The cat and the garbage can stood in a darkened hallway behind a partially obliterated basement wall.