Just like tigers, roses fly

Rosie is a rose, like a tiger is an orange

Stories are layered in her stripes, Licked from old books and stones.

On the tip of her petaled whisker, she once sprung in the long-lost belly

of ships, moored outside Deptford.

She hungers for their remains and bites histories stranded on storeys on the high sea streets—

she naps coiling pasts around her stem

watch the thorns of this lovely cat she bides her time on the lip of becoming she will pounce

sharper than an orange— a swift, a kestrel, a hummingbird