Author Archives: Katie Sticca

  As we snake up through redwoods into the thickening gold haze, my brother the firefighter wonders how long to get a first responder out here, where the sheer gravel road shrinks at random to a single lane, and his … Read More

  We go to Golden Gate Park to have a picnic. Find a patch that is empty, our clearing. Don’t realize until a ball almost bursts the bottle of Bulleit that we are in the middle of the golf course. … Read More

  thunderstorms forming, kids out of school and off to camp, brand new ringtones loaded on phones. Another famous overdose, another fading star on trial, a governor-gone-wild all sexier stories than missiles on the move, protesters bleeding in streets of … Read More

  after Edouard Manet   A young woman with a cigarette—perhaps a prostitute! Or maybe she’s a “shopgirl hoping for company,” but either way, she’s not an upper-class lady, sitting there alone and ungloved. And next to her cigarette hand … Read More

  It’s what we don’t say that holds us together. In the late afternoon, walking along the Danube we talk about the hills and the color of the water, the street names as foreign and clumsy in our mouths as … Read More

  In the living room my mother can’t sleep. Past midnight, reading a magazine, she eats her way to the bottom of the plate. A swirl of lithium carbonate has thinned into her blood. It’s not enough to make her … Read More

  A fire in the middle of the night, my head whipping back to watch the embers warp the black. A light, neither epiphany nor end. In childhood I’d don a glossy helmet and climb through splintering beams, imagining a … Read More

  for Kyle   You died the day the sparrow flew inside the house. We watched it rise to the high windows, query its wings against the glass clouds. A hundred miles away, propulsion, sunlight— a galvanized scrim, the intersection … Read More

  Each door assigned & your name written above the furl of Batman’s cape & a long hall where cells split & not with grace & another sign reading stay away wash your hands & me whispering of this place … Read More

  …the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave. —Marianne Moore   What you first see are the chimney stacks, the moss-covered roofs and then the crosses on top of the gravestones which move up and down … Read More

  Two blackbirds cross the motorway to the east. Gorse like saffron, patching up the side of the hill. Darkest green clusters are of heather, sedge. Brown stains where the water won’t catch. Tall pines crest above the billowing oaks. … Read More

  I walked out beyond the asphalt and the riprap fill behind the beige and gray machine shops, past the brook muscling through growth rife from golf-course effluent and on up to the tall wall around the reservoir, which I … Read More