They may not sweeten after being picked, but they do seem
to get softer, these aging players that were the talk of the baseball
town. For some reason, they suddenly can’t get past the strike zone:
Strike Out (Sonnet Number Something) Read More »
Ageism launched the year we were born—literally. That was the year they
dispatched us and a supercharged word into a no-so-straight-arrowed
world.
Somerville.
Renting a room
in a peeling Victorian,
too many women
sharing one bathroom.
Somerville, circa 1988 Read More »
What shall we celebrate today?
Should it be sugar-free candies
and exercise? That splendid sit-
down cross-trainer that politely asks
listless arms and legs and hands
and feet to do the work for once,
I owe me yet another one – another, I’m sorry I did that
to me, another, please forgive my insensitivity, my inability
to protect us from the unexpected week’s end, blasting
the same old lie, that we were never good enough to survive
I
I was of two minds, now
Returned to one: You do not deserve
Anyone.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at My Past Employer Read More »
I was this many years old when I learned what an opus number
means, how chronological order is not always set by composers,
but by scholars, historians, and academics. And having looked
up the word, as I am wont to do, having taken the head-first swan
Opus Number Something – On Gratitude Read More »
Shall I tell you I am disabled?
That I no longer can fend for
myself? Or shall I tell you
I now write the poetry you
mocked me for because
it does not pay the bills?
Let’s set the record straight.
I do not claim to know what god
might be, nor do I entirely get gestalt.
The Gestalt of God (A Philosophical Draft) Read More »
I did not know what I would write this morning as the treeline
got etched in wisps of ivory blond—until I remembered
I did not get to properly grieve you. Not really, anyway. Sure,
I wrote you a poem. Sure, I teared up now and again, like I am
now when I think of everything you did and offered, but mostly,
selfishly, I miss your listening,
This One, Too, is for Traci Read More »
What would you rather hear? That six or seven
or twelve times or more I actually had ideation,
or that I walked away, instead, unharmed? That I
What You Would Rather Hear Read More »
It’s not that I shoulder a navy
pack on my disintegrating back.
It’s not that I have swallowed
the kind of pills that retch
even the rage out until
**Backpack Part II Read More »
Oh to be unconditionally loved when dead,
division dissolved by the peaceful inevitable.
Oh to the victory that made us one,
the blood of battle and repair
no longer questioned as worthwhile,
immune to “what if?” in its sad reality,
replaced by “what is” and “what was.”
*Lincoln from the Grave Read More »
I return to that Place of Peace,
and the wisdom of ancient things,
the one that reintroduced itself
The Wisdom of Ancient Things Read More »
See, you were the only Black kid in the whole damn school,
and the teacher had to split us up because of how hard
we laughed together.
This (unedited) poem won first place in a contest on The Political Poet. And while I am grateful, that’s not necessarily the important part. The important part is the way this debate spun out of control. The way citizens were encouraged to gang up on other citizens as the county turned a blind eye to hate groups and racism.
You Made Me Feel Illegal Read More »
So I found this short story I wrote back in 2009. I am not a fiction writer. It’s really not my forte. And while I don’t even remember writing this piece, I do remember WHY I wrote it and what was happening at the time. I have not bothered to edit it. So with that, I will let you enjoy a piece of what I will call magical realism. -Katherine
Witchcraft Once Started Read More »
I am not sure what is more important: to tell you how I used
to narrate my life in my mind while I walked the neighborhood
as a child? How I never moved my lips, but somehow
made more exciting that single horse farm on the corner,
the one without the palomino I imagined should have been there?
You see, after a while, you get tired of telling
the same old story again, the sad one, where you
are the interstitial animal living between grains
of ancient sand, separated from both
land and sea, by some careless hand that said
you were made to be lonely. And while I know
being a writer is solitary (how else will we ever
get these so-many-words out of our salty-sweet
minds?) I do not think anyone was made to be alone.
I called it “The Dichotomy,”
not because I knew someone
had already used the title
(that was after I wrote what I wrote)
but because I loved the word—
the way it tore itself apart
