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.
the story / the two white women will not retract, despite the fact /
that inside each story we tell another writes itself
the intoxicating ministry of dusk, the anchor of daylight lifting, sheets white / like a freshly crushed pill, // the vortex of the body and the clap of the / coral tongue...
Before we go any further, I want to publicly acknowledge //
that I love every person in this room. I mean it. /
We’ve traveled from all over to be here, and I love /
each of you, all of you, every last one of you, except /
Harold
I tithe 10% of my new underwear to my future /
self, the one who has fallen in love.
Along one river fell /
all the luck in the world.
The man keeps telling me I’m beautiful. /
I still look young. //
He says it like I’ve asked for it, /
but I don’t care. //
For him or beauty.
How did you travel up my country, /
land at my neck, /
complicate the frontier between /
chin and throat? Oh, folly—
One had a ketchup bottle, the other a bottle of mustard, and they were holding them, crotch-level, squirting long streaks of ketchup and mustard on the floor, while we clapped in unison.
Who begat the earth? I did.
I grew it three times in my belly.
That isn’t true. It is.
Here is the image of a wife
in a thatched smokehouse––
she sleepwalks from fire
to fire, setting start again.
