PARABLE
The first time I saw a bone break
it was an arm. The girl kicked and screamed
to escape her body, twisting on the floor.
It was too much to have a body.
Later, when I broke my own, it was different:
I didn’t try to get away. I stayed in the body
against the swelling that sought to force me out,
picked up my fractured elbow, knee bone,
and carried my body home. Listen, all you
I love, don’t think there’s anywhere else to go.
You must stay in the body too.
Promise me this, and I’ll stay with you
down here with the prick of grass on our legs,
the sun’s heat coming back up through the earth.
____________________________________________________________________
KATIE HERMAN grew up in New Orleans, spent nine years in New York, and now lives in Washington, DC. She is the Assistant Poetry Editor for Sakura Review, and her poetry has appeared in the Mississippi Review. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she teaches writing and literature.
I hold him heavy against my breast /
As he drains me. //
The essence of male and female. /
This, almost unspeakable, ails me.
My brother doesn’t remember all of it /
and I don’t either. Between us //
most of that day is lost.
a man is swallowing his penis and turning into a flower. I thought I could sit down /
and burn a hole through my suffering by sheer focus. I got distracted.
That year? I smell it mostly in the smoke of one long joint /
after another in parked cars next to emptied pools /
on summer days, days that burned into night, believing /
one turn of the key and I could drive away.
in the auditorium of several neighboring windows /
I see a single moth /
as old and miserable as the world
Kaddish is Aramaic for “holy.” /
What could be more holy than a good person? /
My mother put a magnifying glass up to God.
So now you know why I have a habit of collecting broken lines of code / For necklaces or passwords from handwritten recipes like darts dozing / In a traveling case.
Thick summer air / that warms what it chokes, and chokes what it warms. / The locked cage of a lover’s arms. And above us, the / cool prison of the Lord’s regard. What to call this - / the hatred of the earth-bound / for the sky?
I wanted to know how “good poets” /
turn pissing off of the back of a boat /
into something worth reading
I see Heathcliff /
slink out of the forest /
in the morning mist.
