Author Archives: Katie Sticca

  I’ve given up many things to the elements: that floor-length red leather trench, my father’s violin. When the storm rolls in, it’s hard to quiet the crew   in my veins, all of them asking how far ‘til shore, … Read More

  As if the extinct thylacine opened its jaws 180 degrees like a book and swallowed Father clean. Those striped haunches glowing in the forest—see   the beast zigzagging with its prey to the cemetery. The cemetery! Father and I … Read More

  Mrs. Sparrow, your one staring eye is blind to the sky. Flattened like a book, you have an attentive fly,   burnished green and gold, decay’s sleek courtier, who sips daintily at your crushed beak.   Someone has tacked … Read More

  Someone left a water bottle on a tiny gravestone.   I’m at Copp’s Hill Burying Ground in Boston.   I came to see the tomb of Increase and Cotton.   Someone left a water bottle on a tiny gravestone. … Read More

  When my father left us, my mother became a panther, her eyes slow from medication, hunting an answer   the rooms couldn’t give her. She was angry, but didn’t yell as much. She seemed softer, tranquilized by loss,   … Read More

  for Tamir Rice   the officer stops   parks his car at the frost chipped curb the officer can see the boy and spends a few more moments in the heat of his patrol car   he studies the boy … Read More

  on days when he’d been exiled from home and you had yet to learn to travel the crease of your mother’s brow   you’d sit with your father   in his father’s old pickup truck across from the runway … Read More

  I caught the smell of sick on myself, sweet as talcum or skin. My god was exhausted. My god was a glitter. My   mama called sweat a sheen. My god, my mama said, they wouldn’t call it the … Read More

  I went to love because I wanted to believe   in the self as a place that deserved its own destruction. I dwelled on the inside of my   body as a room & found it lacking light,   … Read More

  A fine way of looking at things— me observing you kissing me.   How decent of me to pretend I am shocked by you.   You’re the inverted foot that starts a line: that start of a climb that … Read More

  Why is it so stubbornly in winter? Drifts everywhere, salt shortage. For the men hawking roses in morning rush, nowhere to stand but the street — they’re gonna get hit. The book on exospheric travel wants to know ARE … Read More

  They do not rest or come to Earth, neither Common Swifts nor the crescent moon   in flight, but the Hale-Bopp swings near every few thousand years, and we were out   on the hill above the parking lot, … Read More