Author Archives: Katie Sticca

                      After Yoko Ono   Tulips and chimneys and ash and dirt and honey and salt and hives and the ocean   and hide until everyone goes home, until everyone … Read More

  Not a Rolodex, not Rolex – no, a Bolex camera, two-tiered like a New York apartment building, my grandfather looked down inside it and laughed like a woodpecker – no mirth, only contrivance, I realized later, dress-up laughter, and … Read More

                      The Coast Guard hut flew a blue flag             when the water blew thick and dark, but you were inured to the pleasures   … Read More

              (After Child Ballad 23: Judas) I saw my sister swikele woman beside the road robes ripped and torn from nights in the thicket. I was taxed by travel – treacherous flesh seduced by … Read More

              (After Child Ballad 12: Lord Randall)   The facts are that the mute girl with the mismatched eyes lived in the greenwood, slicing eels from gills to anus, fingering silvered slits, pulling on … Read More

  Hardy’s heart was, upon his death, removed from his body at his request. The rest of him buried in Poet’s Corner, but his heart was buried with his first wife, Emma, dead sixteen years. Thick veined muscle, held in … Read More

  Twilight now, and the night school teacher sits beneath the great chart of the periodic table in the chemistry classroom the overcrowded college across the street has rented and assigned to his section of English Composition. Tonight, the moments … Read More

  Wisteria snaps another wooden slat on the arbor. In the kitchen doorway, buttoning a worn cuff,             you say, Stop at Finest, I need more—             but our daughter … Read More

  Men drive us to suicide,             children pull us back. I’d have more             If it weren’t too late. Where fertility ends,             futility … Read More

  Must be mid-morning, the even light hitting the young woman’s forehead straight on through a window we can’t see. She’s reading a letter, been stuck on the first third of the page for more than three hundred years. Behind … Read More

  The Delaware’s a greenish black river here, flanked by other, slower rivers—fields of snow, rows of leafless sycamores larger than God, two shoulderless snaking roads. I’m in the truck on my way to buy a beast from a man … Read More

              After Simonides, frag. 543   Who locked us, child, inside this cunning chest, left to the stirring sea, the night-lit deep? Should I be glad you’ve finally gone to sleep? Should I, too, … Read More