Month: June 2023

At the Clinic

/ Katrina Kaye / 4 Comments

Katrina Kaye

There is eagerness
in the quiver of your knee.

I feel the rattle
of muscle to bones,
a rougher metal.

I reach for your thigh
as kind as bitch to cub,
hold you still
and our eyes meet.

Caught off guard you
waken from trance.
Come back to me.

You smile.

I take my hand away,
but you catch it with
quick fingers. You say
you are not scared,

but I know well the
carved edges of waiting
room walls and how fake
wood on office doors peels
around the edges.

I’ve been counting the
tiny dots on ceiling tile
for my whole life
just waiting for it to
fall in on me and now
I bring you here,

lover, friend, child.
I am more frightened
than I have ever been.

“At the Clinic” is previously published in To Anyone Who Has Ever Loved a Writer (2014).

Apple

/ Katrina Kaye

Katrina Kaye

Finger paint on belly:
draw your future there,
hazel eyes,
rimmed with green.

Draw the moon
we can make love under,
draw the apple ripe
on the limb.
Actualize need and temptation
in the form of careful tokens.

Wrap layers tight,
so I can’t feel the freeze
you leave about me,

so clumsy steps
against hardwood and
broken window panes
don’t conquer
like they once did.

Instead,
hold fast to my skin.

Roll up in my hair,
finger stray locks
removing the dirt of the day
with tentative strokes.

Be gentle in your word play,
patient in this mislaid speech.

My body hungers at times;
my soul, so desperate,
for the sting and slap of inconceivable future.

Hand – here.
Colors dancing from your fingertips
onto the pale flesh of belly.

“Apple” is previously published in September (2014) and one other anthology which I do not remember.

Strategy

/ Katrina Kaye

Katrina Kaye

There is not always

a strategy to my
arrangement of words.

There is merely the

spitting of cracked
glass or creased brow.

It took a nineteen year
old girl to point out

how many poems I write
about a man I loved

being in love
with someone else.

She asked me if it

was one man or several.
I told her I didn’t know.

I didn’t tell her about

the man I bailed out of jail
to drop off at his lover’s house.

I didn’t tell her about

the alcoholic and the pock marked
poems against upper thigh.

I didn’t tell her about

you and the words that never came
when I need them most.

I didn’t tell her how

a little rain never hurt,
and despite time and distance,

my heart still beats
like a stamped of horses.

The poems I write
are rarely scribbled in

mourning or heartbreak

but in the experience
of survival and continuance.

I tell her she’ll understand

someday how some words are
better unsaid, some questions

should not be asked, and poetry

should be allowed to just be.