Baby Cerberus
Twice I’ve read eulogies for blood
relatives tempering the steel in my voice,
but right now I can’t pen a word for you
without waves churning inside.
I was twelve when you first appeared,
tongue lolling out the side of your mouth,
your teeth sinking into every pair of shoes,
shredding Stephen King paperbacks to confetti.
Every wrong was undone with a wolfish grin
or the begging of your puppy-dog eyes.
You were always chunky, huddled
into the curves of my body,
the vacant space of an outstretched arm,
your snout pressing against my bent knees.
But in the end, you were only flesh and fur
barely clinging to a skeletal frame, sleeping
away most days in a stupor. In this myth,
baby Cerberus curls up to Persephone,
lets her cry into his soft fur, licks her hand,
rests his three heavy heads across her lap.
I’d like to remember you like that:
a young girl’s best friend and confidant.
I am sitting on the concrete blocks where
you used to zoom up and down. Notebook
balanced on my knees, pen in hand,
I’m trying to find the words
to memorialize you. The first line
of my eulogy is this: “I would cross
the River Styx for you.” I would,
I honestly would.
—”Baby Cerberus” from Baby Cerberus by Natasha Ramoutar. Published by Wolsak & Wynn. © 2024 by Natasha Ramoutar. Used with permission of Wolsak & Wynn.
Bring home Baby Cerberus by Natasha Ramoutar.
About Baby Cerberus:
Ethereal, soul-stirring, and playful, Baby Cerberus traces joy and kinship across a multitude of lives. Flitting from myths and folklore to video games to imagined futures, each piece asks us to consider how we care for one another. As we move through sentient galleries, swashbuckling adventures, and the doors of Atlantis, the collection reorients us in each section with the riddles as two lost souls try to find each other through time. These poems tug on the invisible threads between us all, trying to find what tethers us together and, in turn, what keeps us here.
While Baby Cerberus centers fun and nostalgia with allusions to video games, internet lore, and Tamagotchis, there are still heavy themes throughout which address misogyny, racism, and colonization. The unique integration of high-brow topics with some of the more low-brow pop culture references distinguishes the book in the minds of readers by expanding what we can ask of poetry.
Author Natasha Ramoutar. Photo credit: Abynaya Kousikan.
More about Natasha Ramoutar:
Natasha Ramoutar is a writer of Indo-Guyanese descent from Toronto. Her debut collection of poetry Bittersweet, published in 2020 by Mawenzi House, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. She was the editor of FEEL WAYS, an anthology of Scarborough literature. She is a senior editor with Augur Magazine and serves on the editorial board at Wolsak & Wynn.