Author Archives: Katie Sticca

  “The trouble is—I am an old man— you do not think it worth your while to love me.” —Freud to HD   The dog lay by his feet during their sessions, A lion-like chow with a bad temper, or … Read More

  The first time I was stabbed, sunlight napped on the thunder. A receipt caught fire beneath a Sprite can offering its smoke. Raindrops splashed from your skinhead. You were Augustine. If he were a woman born on a boat … Read More

  Translated by Liang Yujing   The sofa: a butterball with excess fat sleeping on the sofa. The bedsheet: a spent, bedsheet-thin guy. The mouth: a stomach ruminating lies and disgorging flowers. After the passion, the two are left to … Read More

  How did we run naked Through a sprinkler Those summers long ago, The flesh of childhood Steeped in sun, Knowing the shock of cold, The mad dance after To shed our bodies Of the numbing rain And how did … Read More

  Grateful I wasn’t the one my mother miscarried. Grateful for being blind in only one eye, for having all my fingers. Grateful a homemade explosive never went off in my hands. Grateful for coffee soaked into my mustache, for … Read More

  I’m wedged against a man holding the pole with one hand, an iPhone with the other, he’s working a crossword’s checkered semaphore of blacks and whites, each space an emptiness to be filled, girded with meaning. Slowly he pecks … Read More

  When my evangelical cousin texts You just must never have witnessed a miracle   I think of Doug punting the basketball. We were ten. He kicked it a good thirty yards,   uphill, meaning only to get it to … Read More

  This garden, its descendants of Stanley’s anemones, flowing, pearlescent like the insides of shells, their offspring mine now, in my yard, fragile beside the orange blare of Dugan’s trumpet vine— the garden’s almanac of inheritances swanning around my own … Read More

Translated by Aviya Kushner   Open the window open it what do you already have to fear tear the window what is already out there breathe the wild skies beauty and pain small fish, rodents, clouds, life flutters under a … Read More

Translated by Aviya Kushner   He was not relevant, in the Population Registry they lost the documents, in the Interior Ministry they claimed it wasn’t possible to verify facts, I signed a declaration and swore in front of the respected … Read More

translated from the Hebrew by Aviya Kushner   Pretty hands, ankles still pretty, white breasts, fattish ass (from where this plenty?) strong gaze weak sight nine-and-a-half years and more countless years I have forgotten love. Forty-nine years and I have … Read More

                          after the painting by Pieter Bruegel   The table is always set. We can eat our way through anything. Memory and desire silence the squeals of the slaughtered— never spoil our appetites. Gluttony, an empty eggshell with legs, carries … Read More