We are pleased to offer our Poets Read series in honor of National Poetry Month 2019 and will run it throughout the month of April.
Every day in April, our website and our YouTube channel will feature the voice of a poet whose work has appeared in our pages over the past year. On Sundays, we will offer two poets for your enjoyment.
Today’s poem is Katherine by Sara Eddy and it appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of Gyroscope Review.
Katherine
by Sara Eddy
You had cataclysmic orange hair
and smooth ruddy deer-legs
and for years we fell into ponds
and told our stories
and dressed each other up.
But then we had a falling
out from which we never climbed
up or back. Does that make
the days spent skinny-dipping
and thunderstorm-dancing--
days that fill me up even now
even 30 years later--
does that make them null,
the stubby ends
of mowed-off weeds?
You are married, have children,
like me you love them.
Your hair is long.
I do not know your mind
anymore, though we would have sworn
we were linked, we were tethered
for life. Ours felt like,
seemed like, the friendship that would
hold our courses steady, that would
curl around us like a tattoo vine.
But I've spent a lifetime
figuring out how to have friends
and still I don’t know how to keep them:
I explode with them
and burn them alive,
and then tell myself
not to look back.
About the Poet: Sara Eddy is a writing instructor at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts. Some of her poems have appeared recently in Forage, Sum, and Zingara, and are forthcoming in One and Dandelion Review. Her poem “Ede Market Day” was included in Terrapin Press’ recent anthology, The Donut Book, and her poem “Peach Jam” won the fall 2018 Causeway Lit poetry competition. She is currently working on a chapbook of food poems with the support of a Fellowship from the Kahn Institute at Smith College. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with a teenager and a black cat and three beehives.