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 was the last place on the planet /
where astronauts slept /
my last customers were the planet’s /
last people
"The biggest challenge of translating Sachs into English, for me, had to do with tracking the movement of her mind in the forming of a poem."
Which vein burst / to offer the holy geometry of yearning / a homeland in your eyes?
That thing you forgot to do last year / has turned out to be important.
There was a rippling pond and the croaking of frogs /
and various birds anas crecca, /
there was the tingling of sand on the Borecké Rocks /
and the cracking of pinecones
I asked a man I was in love with once /
if he was in love with me. No, he said.
Get used to it, kid, everybody wants something from you. /
And they’ll swear they’re giving you a gift.
Prague is falling behind the windows /
like an autumn curtain falls on summer /
like a fish falls after a whale
I’d listen to her work her way through its drama: the //
little girl’s errors hitched to curiosity, her wandering hands, the /
way the wolf and the girl had much more in common than not
say it /
briefly //
like /
a finch’s whistle
