BROTHER,
by KT HERR
I’ve landed hard in the late shambles of November.
Are the scrub-oaks bare there? Has the witch hazel
fizzled? Yesterday, a deluge so instant hammered the yard
I threw myself out of bed, dodging its battery of bullets.
You’ll say I shouldn’t do that—compare things that aren’t bullets
to bullets. I shouldn’t break the season open to let a violence in.
But I’ve been among the poets, to whom everything is now a bullet,
or else its gun, or else some old barn, a field buttered late-gold, a field
onto which any old anxiety might be romantically appliquéd.
Brother, you’ve never asked how it is, living startle to startle—
how it felt, revolving with my clutch of Family Dollar bags
to kick the car door shut, my gaze arrested egg-round against a snub
nose. When the beady eye of that barrel squinted at me down the alley
I would have called even God a bullet. In the shower, I sometimes still recite
the Lighting of the Chalice, the Affirmation of Faith. Another
cockroach infiltrated the pantry today—all that rain—and before I could
kill her, she disappeared underneath the stack of empty grocery bags.
Like some agent of the poets, sent to teach me about my hate.
Like her field was the whole of my floor, and even fleeing
could become a kind of grace. I wish she would teach me that.
I wish I could talk to you, or God—whoever’s closer.
THE HORSES
by KT HERR
Every day I try to draw a horse.
(The grotesque performs its own recompense.)
I try one lying down, one chomping gorse,
one with tail a-flag, a-leap across a fence.
They all look questionably sane. This one
has fetlocks larger than its head. Another
raises hatchets for a mane. I’ve begun
to see them in my sleep: the foals, their mothers,
hanging weird about the feed trough, bereft.
Every day, I try to paint my life.
Like the horses, she lurches, cannon cleft,
limbs gone unshapely underneath the palette knife.
I’m a poor artist of what’s real. I’ll sketch it
all wrong, this myth—how, like a frame, I stretch it.
KT Herr is a writer, educator, and collagist with an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Houston. KT’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Foglifter, Southern Indiana Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. The recipient of creative support from Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, KT serves as board secretary for Four Way Books.
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