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YOUR CART

Kate Sweeney

When people ask me how I am, I never tell them

I have collections of thimbles, rooks, thread, eraser dust, 
and stones. My father always kept a handgun in every drawer 
 
of his house. Patriotism is learning you were conceived 
on the fourth of July, in the shower. I am afraid of trapdoors, 
 
the dark, mutton, the chasm of language. I’m also, ambidextrous, obligation, 
fracture, spar, do not resuscitate. Aren’t all the poems we write 
 
a catalog of grievances? When I panic, I imagine a harbor; the boats 
leave and return. When I was eighteen my mother strangled 
 
me in an empty room of an empty house. When I lived 
in California, I never made it to the sequoias. The only 
 
vocabulary I accumulate is different ways to talk about weather.
“Wood, Wind, No Tuba,” is the perfect title for a painting 
 
of that size. Egon Schiele knew exactly how to make a body 
out of thin air. Homer believed humans were given tears 
 
as compensation for death. I already know the you in my poems, 
even though you do not. And if luck should find my tiny hands 
 
in yours; crutch, mooring, suture, ache. I love you, but I don’t tell 
you enough, and leave and return and leave.
March / April  2023

Kate Sweeney
Kate Sweeney is pursuing an MFA at Bennington College. She has poems most recently appearing or forthcoming from Northwest Review, Muzzle Magazine, Birdcoat Quarterly & other places. Kate has a chapbook, The Oranges Will Still Grow Without Us [Ethel 2022]. She lives in New York. 
Art: Aiyana Masla. Grey Day​. Watercolor and pencil
  
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