Butterflies on the butterfly bush
bees on the rosemary flowers—
It could almost be summer
It could almost be 1983
me on retreat in a bikini
reading Moby Dick in Provincetown, Mass.
It could almost be me
notebook and leaky ballpoint
in hand, trying to say what can’t be said
It could almost be me
taking the summer off
from a marriage that was never a marriage
It could almost be me
deeming love the most important
subject for a poem
Like William Shakespeare or
John Donne, I wanted to create
labyrinths of love, or the lack thereof
I read Rosamunde Pilcher and
Maeve Binchy, friendship and family
troubles in love, happy endings
~~~
I had yet to find my edge
I had yet to find the third-world
country inside me
I had read Sylvia Plath and
Anne Sexton, but I took them
personally—I did not step out of my story
I had not read Gabriel Garcia Marquez
or Isabel Allende or Pablo Neruda—
I read Lora for the music not the pain
I could call this innocence
youth or stupidity—I could call myself
the child of denial, of middle-class magic
that turned injustice into cartoons
Bibbity Bobbity Boo
I am Cinderella and so are you
Not the grim version of the Brothers Grimm
or Baba Yaga and her three horsemen—
no, I was raised
on the bloodless version of life
where bears dance and sing, lions are Jesus
and everyone comes back from the dead
or is whisked off to legend-land
with the once and future king
JFK, MLK and Gandhi
~~~
I am not innocent anymore—
it is 2023, my body talks to me every day
telling me the truth
My heart and my mind are like
an exquisite rainbow trout
sliced open, gutted, filleted and
tossed onto the grill where my juices
drip and my sweet flesh sends
its delicious scent out on the wind
The burnt pieces are the best—
taste them, know the flavor of blood
and slavery of
the only innocence, which is love
the only heaven, which is love
the only justice, which is love
Photo by Alex Muromtsev on Unsplash
Katherine West
Katherine West lives in Southwest New Mexico, near Silver City. She has written three collections of poetry: The Bone Train, Scimitar Dreams, and Riddle, as well as one novel, Lion Tamer. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Writing in a Woman's Voice, Lalitamba, Bombay Gin, New Verse News, Tanka Journal, Splash!, Eucalypt, Writers Resist, Feminine Collective and Southwest Word Fiesta. New Verse News nominated her poem And Then the Sky for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. In addition she has had poetry appear as part of art exhibitions at the Light Art Space gallery in Silver City, New Mexico, the Windsor Museum in Windsor, Colorado, and the Tombaugh Gallery in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She is also an artist.
