Katherine's Coffeehouse

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.

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,

Tell me you made love without telling me you made love.

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.

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

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.

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,