Katherine's Coffeehouse

Last night was another nightmare, except this time, they attacked my brother who somehow also worked there. And while I […]

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,

Strange how dreams and poems work, how everything mixes together, and some of

Because you wore a t-shirt with a rainbow on it, and because your earrings looked like the ones I wore in college, oblong and shell and dangling to your lovely thin shoulders, and a smile that invited me in that first time we met, and because you talked to me about writing

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.