Author Archives: Katie Sticca

  Here is my first offering, love: The first time I flew over the Citadelle (The clouds above it shifting to bare its vast self: Fortress meant to keep the French from ever, If not forever, in this part of … Read More

  Saint Augustine preached humility & the need to simply be on the ground. Do you wish to rise? he asked. What would he say of these words then, which, after all, are meant to replace us? What would he … Read More

  —Charlottesville, VA   I am sitting in a station built in the Depression, an island in a scrap drive sea. Now they’ve converted, serve fire-roasted vegetables, plates of bread. In the thirties, home to hobos, Ford-mint autos, kids play … Read More

  In the beginning was nothing, nothing orthodox, nothing unorthodox. Only the pure point of utterness out of which are all things disposed. Still—from the mountain-top you could see all things: south, the island villages, the fields and wildscapes, teeming … Read More

  Santa Fe, 2018   walked down that street past our casita the place we’d stayed our bedroom window past the Cathedral the Christmas music our last Christmas the deep mid-winter and into the plaza the plaza lights on your … Read More

  What is there— other than the bear hold—held up in cold nights as example, other than the body of bears, waiting in caves— the opposite of caving in. Nakedness is what we bear and the cloak and dagger of … Read More

  for Gloria Emerson We were sitting on the back porch when the news came on the radio: Saddam’s tanks racing across the desert into Kuwait. “That’s it,” she said, rising from her chair, flinging her enormous arms to the … Read More

  For a long time I wanted to drink a cup of winter, to become tipsy on early dark & longer starshine. The thinning light my favorite ether. These days I am uncertain, dead reckoning my way through— surrendering to … Read More

  We could use some new memories to replace permanent shadows left by people when that next morning the sun rose in Japan as if nothing untoward was happening down here— or a heart transplant to harbor compassion and ward … Read More

  There’s nothing more now but vacant bodies, the equations of being buried. I turn around: everyone is up to their shoulders in sand, they strain to turn their heads, and yet they clamor. Every cry is an alarm set … Read More