Katherine's Coffeehouse

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

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

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.”

I return to that Place of Peace, and the wisdom of ancient things, the one that reintroduced itself

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.

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