Janiculum Hill, Rome All November, noon didn’t seem like noon:the light too yellow-gold and pressing long shadowson the burnished stones of every square. Even morningfelt late in the day, as if I’d already missed too much.And of course I had—around the city, marble columnshave cracked into boulders as ordinary as umbrella pines.Roads veer the way […]
🙂 When my order of slime comes in the mailI feed each textured batch its own dribble of borax and spring water. The parcel might as well be a newborn left at the door.We play Loving Family and Caregiver. We play Spa Day. I pull their puddy muscles and twist their pliant bodies at anglesthat feel good […]
Letters to the Museum Docent from One Hundred Years After I – Spring I moved in after the moss,found a place among the relics;made my bed in the vellum-soft interiorof some ancient canoe.I wandered, not so different from the visitors, from the rivers, the ones that paidto traipse about the shimmering halls of history,to study […]
Vigil for a Bird Her fetal cheek should notpress against this grayresting place: the raw swirlof her alien flesh, droppedfrom the sky, is a small shock, exposedon the dirty sidewalk. She had no chancefor flight: her silver scatteredfeathers are little as the pinky nailsof a human child and shine like eyelashesin the sun, though the […]
All the Animals Lately everything feelsburdensome—the rifts in the pavement,the snow, which piles up in drifts my landlord never plows.My friend calls from Los Angeles,where his father has finished his first round of chemotherapy.In the light, my friend says,he looked terrible, placid and small in the hospital bed. When he walked,he dangled a bundle of […]
Sweetie Apple Death hissed over my head when, eleven, I gotan infection—MRSA, I think—and boils bobbedup under my skin like apples in a bucket at a carnival. I went to the state fair that summer, an infection—maybe MRSA—bobbinginside me as Mom drove us all the way down Illinois.I went to the state fair that summer, […]
Many Worlds Hypothesis I wouldn’t know, but what if / every time I order a ___________________/ another […]
The Other Things We Swallow A is for the Americanbeast who devoured my mother.C is for the coyotes that wanderdesert and mountain, looking to lick the bones of abandoned chuco women.E is for el, el hombre, el macho, que se […]
kat kluegel (she/they) is a poet from Minneapolis, Minnesota who is interested in the less rational aspects of being human. She loves the color red, riding the bus, an earnest exclamation point, and the word crabwise. She is working on a book-length lyric essay exploring the intersection of eros and grief. This is her first […]
