First Cousins
Perhaps justice is akin to kindness,
Katherine’s Coffeehouse
I Want To Know What Causes It
I want to know what causes this pain.
Not just the ache we all eventually have
in the shell of our muscle and bone.
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Various Newer Haiku
Haiku written in May thus far. Katherine Mercurio Gotthardt, copyright 2024, all rights reserved.
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Why AI Will Not Take Over the World
And this six o’clock
Saturday morning,
I thought I’d be brave
enough to write about
birds, or how blessed
anyone is to get to grow
old, only I am thinking
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The World Has Changed from when I Last Was Here
I want to tell you things
look different now, more
early morning, more finch
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Backstories
Even dandelions have backstories,
if you think long enough about your
past. How when you were supple
I Do Not Know the Name of this Town
And I would like to label it just a bad mood,
this feeling of being closed in, trapped by
failing bone and muscle and a system set
tightly around the rich and healthy. Except
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I Was Okay Until I Found Her Collar
Moving inherently means sorting
through the ages, opening trunks
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To Me, an Apology
I owe me yet another one – another, I’m sorry I did that
to me, another, please forgive my insensitivity, my inability
to protect us from the unexpected week’s end, blasting
the same old lie, that we were never good enough to survive
Thirteen Ways of Looking at My Past Employer
I
I was of two minds, now
Returned to one: You do not deserve
Anyone.
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Opus Number Something – On Gratitude
I was this many years old when I learned what an opus number
means, how chronological order is not always set by composers,
but by scholars, historians, and academics. And having looked
up the word, as I am wont to do, having taken the head-first swan
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Shall I Tell You?
Shall I tell you I am disabled?
That I no longer can fend for
myself? Or shall I tell you
I now write the poetry you
mocked me for because
it does not pay the bills?
The Gestalt of God (A Philosophical Draft)
Let’s set the record straight.
I do not claim to know what god
might be, nor do I entirely get gestalt.
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This One, Too, is for Traci
I did not know what I would write this morning as the treeline
got etched in wisps of ivory blond—until I remembered
I did not get to properly grieve you. Not really, anyway. Sure,
I wrote you a poem. Sure, I teared up now and again, like I am
now when I think of everything you did and offered, but mostly,
selfishly, I miss your listening,
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What You Would Rather Hear
What would you rather hear? That six or seven
or twelve times or more I actually had ideation,
or that I walked away, instead, unharmed? That I
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**Backpack Part II
It’s not that I shoulder a navy
pack on my disintegrating back.
It’s not that I have swallowed
the kind of pills that retch
even the rage out until
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