Katherine's Coffeehouse

No more, those morning tears. I’ve absorbed them, adoring them, like salty gods, singing them, like the rime of an ancient mariner.   Water, everywhere. See? I didn’t drink.   I didn’t have to.   #KatherinesCoffeehouse #PoetryMonth

What if on Bring Your Kids to Work Day I brought my books? What if I sat them next to me on an a wheeled office chair, facing me cover first, my nom de plume on them, their birth mother, their title their given name, copyright their birthday, page numbers their weight, ISBN their social, […]

It’s hard so hard to get specific. No one wants to wait while you try to recall words you really need to explain a problem, a fear, a flower.   You always end up generalizing. “It’s pink,” you say, but you known in your heart the cut peony is fuchsia, lightening bolts of white passing […]

Each March, I fall for it, the siren sun wading through blue to the abandoned crow’s nest over my house, sticks and torn shopping bags jutting out like a Jolly Roger, the sound of possibility trifling with dead leaves and plastic. Even the raven won’t land here, and the squirrels have abandoned ship. So what […]

Fear doesn’t bother to sneak in. It lunges, with a screech, arms spread like wild wings, fingers grotesque talons of some long-extinct lizard fabled to sear the town in flames. And somehow, you’re not surprised. And, you ought to know what to do. You’ve seen the movie – find the soft underbelly hidden beneath a […]

We did not spring forward – we looked there, all the while wondering whether approaching snow would march us back to winter. #KatherinesCoffeehouse

Past eleven. Were it morning, it might not matter, but night’s a story that should have ended an hour ago, slammed shut, the finality of day done, an old woman muttering, “enough is enough.” But I’m still up. I’m still writing. Still trying to wrap my keyboard around moving words, the kind that slip between […]

The future, she said, relies on our stomachs, growling for something other than edible, something younger, something deferring the Earth, the indispensable effort of the blind. It’s okay. Don’t trip. It’s not necessary. Mind the walk of the native, she said. Feel for her next footstep. Place your heel in the ancient clay turned bone […]

I got on a list, blown kisses by mega-marketers with a fetish for…construction? Aluminum piping, seamless gutters, steam rollers, ice remover, plastic molding makers, sealants, caulking, grout, some metal I can’t pronounce – it’s the randomosity that gets me. What kind of data claims a writer needs high-heat edge shavers, or sanders, or drivers, or […]

I submitted because I saw ‘defenestration’ in a WWII detective novel, and had to look it up. The same day I discovered a journal of the same name, so I sent the poems in, thinly clad, barely edited, but mine. That’s no joke, but the timing – o timing is a funny belt we loosen […]