Author Archives: Katie Sticca

                          after the painting by Pieter Bruegel   Travel is travail the shortest trek is turmoil Mother Earth holds us close so low there is nothing we don’t look up to we are occasions for compassion or cruelty whatever’s in … Read More

translated from the Chinese by Fiona Sze-Lorrain   A villain can’t be someone concrete. A villain can be a neighbor, but not mine can be a leader, but not yours can be you, but not the real you can also … Read More

  Snakes in the tall grass, sprinklers ticking the first time he forced my head underwater.   I counted seconds in the blue, planetary flecks on the concrete wall underwater.   He pulled me up, then the game repeated itself. … Read More

  Snakes in the tall grass, sprinklers ticking the first time he forced my head underwater.   I counted seconds in the blue, planetary flecks on the concrete wall underwater.   He pulled me up, then the game repeated itself. … Read More

  The scavenger coyotes come at hunters’ shots. My father relates these snippets on the drive to a refuge for an afternoon walk.   I notice, on the middle seat of his capped pickup, something black, handheld, metal in the … Read More

The will of the tine shall break the soil into lines of seed   seeds   small as beads of sweat   to roll   & neaten our broken soil                    to rise from plumules   to dicotyl   a simple sequence laid in a … Read More

  All day, blue mustangs of clouds charge from west to east, unfinished bodies over us. Though they aren’t animals,   we are, and see equine jawbones in the vapors, curve after curve billowing, the rise of their necks, their … Read More

  My brain can barely fathom him at all. After the usual kiss, he fades away. But when I wake him he wants me to stay so I do.  He perks up in the dining hall,   among familiar faces … Read More

  Off the path: the demolished hospital’s littered ravine. Single yellow bricks stamped: Standard Steel, West Branch. Broken plates, the bottom of a mug. Jars, jars, jars, like larvae emerging from mud— thaw softened them free—I can see in a … Read More

  now you are darker than I can believe it is not wisdom that I have come to with its denials and pure promises but the absences I cannot set down W.S. Merwin   You were the brittle membrane between … Read More