Author Archives: Katie Sticca

  spring days feel a little salty dry sun, a cold and hard ball of white wind lifts our house up to mid-air, a tree of peach blossom slanting by a bazaar’s stone steps like a half-stretch of pink sand … Read More

  The shepherd-poet measures himself against the void, cuts from the canvas of nothingness a poet shaped outline which he massages into a coat, his fingers working against its pliant and unyielding abyss.   It reminds him of the terrible … Read More

  The morning drive east on Trapelo Road. Cars become islands in a fog of light. The white is seamless, a piece of unsewn cloth   laughing in the air. I try to find my place in this abyss.   … Read More

  Do not follow me anymore, Atthis, like Sappho I also adored you, but do not sleep in me like a nightmare now. Mirrored in a boy’s soft eyes I saw your braids, the trees lay down with us on … Read More

  When I arrive at your door and you come with a blush apple at your mouth and eyes packed thick with spruce, I let myself think of the photo you sent me— your hair an offering of dark webs … Read More

  Locked under linocut trees, slabs with lyrics or long phrases on them. A field of stones that only say “MOTHER” “FATHER” “HUSBAND” in low relief under leaves—the birds of autumn, skimming or touching down, ochre brown, red-breasted or canary. … Read More

              Pine Creek Lake, Montana   Ice-raked granite walls sweep up three sides of this alpine meadow; a stream falls, noisy, down a rocky lip where outsized trout, crimson-striped, jump and slide. Two tents—ours— … Read More

  All the lives inside the compound.   A red moon stalled over Kilimanjaro.   Forces joined. Truces brokered.   Everything you’ve tried to mend broken.

  Diego painted the mother cradling him. Frida painted him as he was in death— eyelids parted (hold a mirror: no breath). Diego painted the mother cradling him. The mother believed in prayer, and sin. Frida believed in doctors, not … Read More

  He told me the story of absence, its contents, the thickness of its spine,   nicknames of guards providing blurbs, the setting which is neither place nor   not-place. In some places, he said, oranges shrivel if treated harshly … Read More

  The calculated weakness of “weak force” Was ignored, so we never saw how Weak it was or just how starved a man could be, And when they punched him, the numbers Went up and up until His soul was … Read More

      “The path comes into being only because we observe it.”             —Werner Heisenberg   No, your wits can’t fix this.         The closer you look the more you’re wrong. … Read More