Katherine's Coffeehouse

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 […]

Now more than then, #Facebook needs #poetry, and art of the masters and royal ladies who dare to dabble on timelines, old cobblers tearing off the heels of era, sublime restoration of a different kind, the way fragile leather of the unheard moves. Does it not know no one’s really listening? Does it not know […]

This cannot be my America. Where bloated power stuffs rags in the mouths of servants, weakened because some bastards removed their food and means, leaving them to live on charity. Sympathy. This cannot be my America. Where smirking young men mock Veteran elders on t.v. and the image of a crying native elicits no longer […]