Katherine's Coffeehouse

It has been too long/since I've felt an infant's cheek

Those times you have insomnia dragging you to the streets,

I'm thinking of those who blister beneath bland words, boil at banal exposure

Easter – door open, inviting in the sun, we are weeding your new front lawn,

It’s the connotation that matters: Something feasible turns preferable,

It's absurd, this deafening ring, as if I'd put my ear by an air raid call, let the sound in, allowed the assault. The results are astoundingly inconsistent - deaf to the voice of my husband, overly sensitive to the wail of t.v. What was that you said, honey? Ouch. Please turn down the volume, […]

That 1980’s phone, boxy against your ear – don’t you think we could hear better then? Didn’t we listen more closely back then? Nothing like these damn flat phones. I press them against the cartilage, grinding my lobe against the glass, earrings clinking. Whoosh. There’s the wind again. What was that you said? Never mind. […]

Protest poem by Katherine M. Gotthardt

I yanked the fragment from my eye, through burst blood vessels glimpsed clearly the one still in yours, jutting through the soft membrane of what you consider truth, teargas and tanks. What to do when an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.