All in by Kathleen Winter
by Kathleen Winter
She was so tired of I She thought she might kill her
but that was too much in sync with society’s violence
so She just sent I to Libya for a while, which, come
to think of it, struck She as potentially more dangerous.
She’s maxed out on I’s gripes and wiles, worse than
Berryman’s plus less original. She can’t read another
syllable about I’s nasty childhood, current ills,
her aches either in the organ meat or in opaque layers
of abstraction. She knows I’s tricks, her jokes;
She finds them juvenile. She wishes I would reinvent
herself, take herself to task, to heart, to a Devon
swannery, to the moon. She used have a tolerance
for I, like the tolerance She’s old teacher would
from time to time note that some ancient bard
(Auden?) had for a rare rhetorical strategy or twist
of syntax. A tolerance, good Dubie would explain.
I must know She’s lost it, that grace or patience
She once sent I’s way. Now I is out of Africa, yet
She claims she won’t see her, hear her, think of her.
I hopes this all eventually blows over;
She and I share too much history to throw it all away.
_________________________________________________________
Kathleen Winter is the author of Transformer, I will not kick my friends, and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, Prairie Schooner, Michigan Quarterly Review, Yale Review, Agni, Shenandoah, and Cincinnati Review. Her awards include the Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award, the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize and the Ralph Johnston Fellowship at University of Texas's Dobie Paisano Ranch.
by Kathleen Winter
Ghost of my face
on my face, specters
of my self on these
streets, turning corners
& corners & corners
& corners, striding
all wrong directions
away from the Parc
away from the Seine
stiff as a stone saint
looming in a stone
chapel of a stone
faith, refusing to bend
with the centuries.
Still poorly using
a paper map, poorly
creased, poorly
folded. Now, at last,
sitting. Staring left
at one leg of an ill-
fated pig, hoof
attached, clasped
by its slender ankle
in a steel ring,
immobilized,
to be sliced by
the deliberate
imperturbable waiter.
Not nearly far
enough away
from the action,
I watch
from a banquette
in this vintage
establishment
known far & wide,
quite over the sea,
where even as it is
here, time
is the butcher.
____________________________________________________________
Kathleen Winter is the author of Transformer, winner of the Hilary Tham prize; I will not kick my friends, winner of the Elixir Prize; and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, winner of the Antivenom Prize. Her poems appear in The New Republic, New Statesman, Yale Review, Agni, Massachusetts Review, Cincinnati Review, and Poetry London. Her awards include the Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award, the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize, and the Ralph Johnston Fellowship.
