Katherine's Coffeehouse

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.

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

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

Last night was another nightmare, except this time, they attacked my brother who somehow also worked there. And while I was sitting with my brother, right in front of our boss, my brother would not—could not—say a word, and neither could I because we were all sitting far too close, there, in person, face to […]

I kept listening to that old cassette in the radio of my beat-up car, the used one I had paid too much for and financed with my soul—the voice of a Texas woman, accent thick as my debt,

My dearest ones, I want to tell you what I saw today just from looking outside at the sky: yes, it was grey, and a mist hovered about the window in shadows of condensation. And yes, a heavy fog had been gathering around my heart

This one is for the trashmen, and all the people who have to pick up before the sun implants itself into the womb of daytime, disposing of useless and discarded things through the harshest nights.

Dear Mrs. McGreevy, I am sorry I was a little scared of you when I knew you were alone, how afraid I was to kiss your cheek – you see, I could not bear the way that rude hair on your forgotten chin would puncture the innocence of my own, and I was so very much afraid that your mouth had resisted its own skin, taught against the gums,