In this week’s poem, “cat and mouse,” Grace Sleeman conjures an onslaught of dark fairy-tale images as a meditation on a girl contending with self and identity. I love how this poem draws its fraught visions from myth, childhood and the elemental — teeth and thorns, fingers bent back on a dare, electricity — and how its depiction of the girl’s plight is at once, raw, curious and tender.

Sleeman has fallen out of every tree she’s ever climbed. She grew up among the lilacs in Damariscotta, and now lives in Portland. Her work has been published by Koukash Review, Noise Magazine, and Slipstream Press, among other publications. You can find her online at @myrmiidons, or looking for worms after a thunderstorm.

cat and mouse

By Grace Sleeman

a girl is a mouth filled with teeth — spine bent back, skin exposed.
raw wire scraping pavement, sparks burning too bright to watch.
a girl is drowning and she bites the hand that comes to help her.
a girl is covered in thorns. she cannot tell if she grew them herself;
either way she is bleeding.

a girl is spinning before a dark window.
a girl is observed — the men she imagines outside her window,
the men in her mirror, the men in her head.
a girl bends her fingers all the way back to prove she can.
a girl is made of teeth and bone. she will not break.
she will not cry. men are watching.

Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “cat and mouse,” copyright 2025 by Grace Sleeman, appears by permission of the author.