Author Archives: Katie Sticca

  Having deep-cleaned the home of the reigning brand ambassador for a haute line of children’s books, I’d had enough of all those stories. Kids spinning back through history to be heroes, stamping out the start of a factory fire … Read More

  from Nora right before I left for work at Apollo, our college town’s carpet cleaning service. Twelve-hour days in the Midwest drought summer of 1988, sucking up dirt from wall to wall. I sold Scotchgard upgrades as often as … Read More

  —for Joey   Who knew we’d scramble out the rip of the ocean of home?   Your flailing limbs proving first is the worst. Who knew we’d subsist   as a rule? Morph into navigators of adulthood—me with a … Read More

  In my body it had grown, and then it slopped into a trough as the midwife heaved   like bringing in a dory. I barely felt it pass, workhorse of a vessel, the tug that coaxed out   the … Read More

  We are anchored in the stars —Larry Dossey, MD   Before I could grab nitrile gloves & drop the body in the garbage can a black triangle dive-bombed   the driveway— two wingmen & one flying point— pinched the … Read More

  —after Frost   If it were five years ago I was dying, who would it have been who cared? That one boy I could count on to board the train Sundays I bought apples from my father at the … Read More

  idol adorned with eyelashes, fingernails, other half-alive things. teeth & psalm, bitten and bless, so much bone. a song, a jewel, to divine like omen — how to begin this reckoning?   go to the river. mouth the shore. … Read More

  Part of childhood remains buried under sandcastles. You used to poach grasshoppers with an old hairnet until it caught strands of cobwebs and would not let go. Memories are but hearsay. So is a sachet that used to contain … Read More

  One at the end of the fence line was all rot, And more rot, the ghostly maps of leaves. Another, clogged like a drain, came up in gobs, In billowing handfuls of slime. And the one A mile away, … Read More

  —after Howard Moss’s “Tropical Fish”   Prism smears of runoff through elastic rainbow sand, And nurdle beaches dish into a bin of brilliant bay, Translucent puffs, and bobbing box and bottle fish, Storm cloud schools of polyethylene, and glint, … Read More

  Your cousins, a few friends line up in the pew. Your brother— absent. He stole from you, lied that you locked your cupboards to starve him, tried to con five G for burial when he wasn’t dead. The priest … Read More