Kirsten Kaschock
Docenture3
Recognize breakfast is, all kitchens, the first sickly willow bits of spring. Also
cigarettes and old bones, soiled pits of once-white dresses, never again pure—
never baccalaureate. Phantoms of office park fog choke same way dreamt lions
slash a throat, jonquils scratch epitaphs. A thousand colors go by the name.
They’ll haunt you. Poverty is the failure to boom, spin straw to coin, that end-
less laundering, tooth of grinning troll at the ‘mat. A fondest treasure: Holly
Hobbie bike with banana seat. Kink starts somewhere, twelve maybe. Tassles
on handlebars, bedrooms eavesdropping on a dripping sink. Hard water, soap.
“To be a girl” is consistently subtitled “Being hurt.” There’s a video installation
on earning back that forsythia. The first suicide of our season (aspen) has been
likened to quaking courage, as if it were bold—the willingness to die. Gold is de-
picted by yolks and youth, slobber of honey a signal of beginnings’ sticky ends.
We show no in-between. Yellow is the full and present force of the sun, else it’s
taint of something gone or gone off. The artists gathered here want bright and free
of aging. They would drive through a bee-sting not to live on in rind, reeking
of industrial weakness, grated into wet dust. A bus—clean through that thorn.
Kirsten Kaschock, a 2019 Pew Fellow in the Arts, is the author of five poetry books: Unfathoms (Slope Editions), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press), The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press), and Explain This Corpse (winner of Blue Lynx Prize from Lynx House Press). Coffee House Presspublished her debut speculative novel--Sleight. She teaches at Drexel University. kirstenkaschock.com
Return to July 2021 Edition
Recognize breakfast is, all kitchens, the first sickly willow bits of spring. Also
cigarettes and old bones, soiled pits of once-white dresses, never again pure—
never baccalaureate. Phantoms of office park fog choke same way dreamt lions
slash a throat, jonquils scratch epitaphs. A thousand colors go by the name.
They’ll haunt you. Poverty is the failure to boom, spin straw to coin, that end-
less laundering, tooth of grinning troll at the ‘mat. A fondest treasure: Holly
Hobbie bike with banana seat. Kink starts somewhere, twelve maybe. Tassles
on handlebars, bedrooms eavesdropping on a dripping sink. Hard water, soap.
“To be a girl” is consistently subtitled “Being hurt.” There’s a video installation
on earning back that forsythia. The first suicide of our season (aspen) has been
likened to quaking courage, as if it were bold—the willingness to die. Gold is de-
picted by yolks and youth, slobber of honey a signal of beginnings’ sticky ends.
We show no in-between. Yellow is the full and present force of the sun, else it’s
taint of something gone or gone off. The artists gathered here want bright and free
of aging. They would drive through a bee-sting not to live on in rind, reeking
of industrial weakness, grated into wet dust. A bus—clean through that thorn.
Kirsten Kaschock, a 2019 Pew Fellow in the Arts, is the author of five poetry books: Unfathoms (Slope Editions), A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press), The Dottery (University of Pittsburgh Press), Confessional Science-fiction: A Primer (Subito Press), and Explain This Corpse (winner of Blue Lynx Prize from Lynx House Press). Coffee House Presspublished her debut speculative novel--Sleight. She teaches at Drexel University. kirstenkaschock.com
Return to July 2021 Edition