Author Archives: Katie Sticca

  The nurses pass like wisps of blue cloth brandishing syringes of colorful liquids. They say this is for pain or this is for vermillion or this is for dragon. They know my smile means I stopped caring days ago. … Read More

              —after Kiki Dimoula   The goat was bleating so much its voice had grown hoarse. Furious, I opened the oven door: “Knock it off. Our company can hear you.” “But it isn’t even … Read More

  Gaze down these pink tunnels into deeper pink. The walls are blossoms fashioned of smaller blossoms attached to raised arms that nuzzle other arms. It’s like watching a parade that poses while I parade. Random sprays liven up the … Read More

  Still alive, the pond freezes and melts, can’t decide.   It remembers the stream that fills it underground.    Caught in a circle of hewn stone, it shivers.   It wants what it wants. But the mind knows what … Read More

             Village of Chokan, 8th Century A.D.   If he returns after drinking his black wine I-don’t-know-where. . . . His armor, piled against the plum tree in repose, puffs out its metal chest, shows … Read More

  empty page of a day and I’m fixed as a prisoner in haunted city walls where the bartender keeps book a flock of blue sails huddle together against the storm that’s rising to cleave their midst I pace the … Read More

  Pale blue arms folded like a bow across her heart, you were born into silence, the umbilical frayed like your loose connection to life. The priest and his water were too late and too weak, the water drawn up … Read More

  Measuring out two fingers, I pour it into a heavy glass, weight all in the base. The murmur of it shining —I sip down. Late, I’ve looked out many windows, hypnotized by strumming streetlights. The train’s tremolo rattles the … Read More

  Easier than writing in air, but not impossible. A woman at the Chinese temple grieved for her lost son. She wrote the story on the landing of a wide set of steps, stacks of wet characters spilled precisely. My … Read More

  And this is where they found him in the snow. At first we thought a hunter’s shot a deer. My husband’s gun. My garden does not grow. A prescient dream the night before: a crow bugling taps in the … Read More

              All obscurity starts with a danger.                       –Sylvia Plath I reach out in memory, refugee taking refuge, small girl floundering to follow a star … Read More

  The pages in August were pulpy, some as thick as my tongue, some folding over like tendrils, some spinning out of the orbits of their spines, some oozing a faint smell of yeast, some of milk, some of brine, … Read More