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.
And so it waits, /
with the patience born /
from lying under a volcano
You’d sometimes flash your dick /
in bars for wild amusement and strip on stage. /
Jail kept your talent disciplined and quick.
The girl takes the /
umbrella or /
does the umbrella take /
the girl /
lead her out into the wet /
evening and /
touch her softly on the hand
I insulted him. /
He looked like a crazy Italian fish. /
He looked like a sausage lipped piranha. /
He looked like a hitman for the mob /
and I insulted him.
The state is ill; therefore, I am ill. /
....
I am learning the difference between urgency /
and importance.
a petrified man sliding backwards, towards us
in his useless van—the army jeeps
crawling towards refugee camps abandoned
in the storm. We're not here to witness
them.
There are days, says the child, /
when God is not even God, when /
the moon is also not the moon.
They had already sat down on the bed. Then the man remembered the back door was still open.
There was a picture in the paper, front /
page, as if this news was the end of cruelty.
I want to ask her /
about the long veils of widows. /
She’ll just shake her head.
