Katherine's Coffeehouse

Last night I dreamt of a girl, not just any girl, she was eleven and had long, black, pretty hair and an innocent pale face with a little nose and serious lips and a chin that had not seen as many meals as she needed and her mother didn’t want her anymore and her father had disappeared.

This is my love song to men. And men who identify as men. Not men who pose, snap pictures of you, then drop you in gutters to drown in waters they pour from the rooftop.

They called it The Baltimore Catechism— every doctrine has one, but this book had a special creed for teens: God, remind me to obey and do what I am told, remind me in order to be loved, that first, I must be lovable.

Once, there, I saw a soldier, leaning against a barren tree,

I am a poet. Of course I speak my truth.

Help me not be normal. Help me when I am in formidable first grade, counting my fingers under my desk because math is hard and there's too much talk from inside out and every last word barges into my brain the way you did my bedroom

i dreamt last night i hid in an elevator molding my back into angles and steel

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining I believe in love even when there's no one there I believe in God even when he is silent

I've decided it's a birdcall, not the Canada goose I will be in the life I live after my next, more like the mourning dove,

We aren't much to look at, we poets, unless you look very closely, which most aren't wont to do. It's not that they don't get us. They just don't have time for us, missing the chance to see the blue feathered heron, one pencil-lead leg fixed in the sludge of the runoff in the morning. […]