In Between

/ Katrina Kaye

Katrina Kaye

The woman I was is desperate

to find conciliation with the woman I will be.

We come together inside aging skin

and seek a stretch of days to cradle and

consolidate all that cannot be forfeit

before opening to all that is to come.

I am not yet finished.

I must create the new out of fragments of what was,

exchange the innocent for the seasoned.

The skin, once raw,

have felt the heat of summer days.

The trivial mixed with the essential

and all the slippery spots in between

seek a union, a compromise,

a new form, eager and able to embrace

all that is to come.

What once was green

is now ripened red.

“In Between” is previously published in Introspection Quarterly (2022).

Sketchbook

/ Katrina Kaye

Katrina Kaye

You can tell he still loves her
by the way he shades
the muscles of her arm,

careful sketches over rounded flesh.

She left pencil shavings clinging to him,
spider webs grazing the top of his head
woven into unwashed hair.

He looks for her in the morning,
reaches across a cold bed
to trace her outline in head crushed pillow.

Not yet ready to replace these impressions,
or wash her scent from loose sheets.

He pretends he can hold her,
keep her safe,

a green and yellow parakeet
nestled in his palm.

Head twisting back,
sharp black eyes reflect
thick fingers around fragile frame.

He was sure,

despite
the flick of restless glances,

the spit of tears from a cursing tongue,

the hollowness in the cage of her ribs,

she would keep.

So sure

he could reverse rip currents
pump air into languid lungs,

resurrect the broken.

You can tell he still loves her
by the way he won’t catch your eye,

the small tremble in his voice
when he says her name
and looks away.

“Sketchbook” is previously published in The Fall of a Sparrow (2014).

Figs

/ Katrina Kaye

Katrina Kaye

My girlfriend gets drunk
and tells me about the life she almost had,
the man she almost stayed with,
the home she almost created.

She is remembering tonight:

a sweet regression to a time                when there was
more fruit on the tree,

when she had the novelty of choice.

It happens to all of us, doesn’t it?
That regress to younger days and different decisions.

But this was a hard one for her
and the confession of “what if” is
pouring out of her in words mildly slurred
in her high pitch, baby voice
that she only gets when she’s upset.
She keeps saying “I could’ve” as if
any of it mattered.

She is exhausted and broken and vulnerable
and honest and angry and innocent and
so human I can’t help but to love her.

Love her for being able to express and confess
all the lost fruit: the ones that dropped,
the ones that remained out of reach.

There are parts of me that have fallen away,
that I rarely miss, but every now and then
I have a vision of that former life:

a dream or a discombobulated memory
of what might have been                     trips and tricks

before flaking away like the top layer of
skin shed in the sun.

 

“Figs” is previously published in Steel Jackdaw Poetry (2025).