Issue 9: April 2007.
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Home > Issue 9: April 2007 > Poetry
3 poems by Katherine Holmes
Line gone dead
Sat in a corner
the day after it went dead.
That phone belonged in a museum
I thought,
having glued a magazine illustration
an antique earpiece and mike
on the rotary disk
to cover the decade and dinginess
a defunct number.
Like a nostalgia-overloaded old flame
wanting to tear it from the jack
in a non-contact sport
I came to hate the telephone
and wondered if Alexander Graham Bell
anticipated Celtic insults soaring over backyards
at the speed of anger.
He could “cause his own hair
to stand on end. It is in him,”
wrote a woman journalist
he distrusted.
Then he threw up his hands in court
sickened at the patent claims
of slanderous strangers thick
as telemarketers.
I tossed my museumpiece
of a woman speaking her mind
without being beaten
into the garbage can the obsolete earlobe
and stair-slope design. As it hit bottom,
it rang!
If only cats could coo
If only cats could coo,
she drowses, pulling a
pillow over her earlobes,
her claw-voiced alarm
would be a perfect lamb.
If only the man whose
shoulder cloaked her
like her eyelids, the one
who fishtails at talk,
if only he had the
landing wheel confidences
of a cozy romantic
she could walk away from.
She dozes to a studio
cave and clays together
composite models, best
attributes of boyfriends,
the livable of what she
has known, such as whatever
devotes one to Beethoven
with a Rousseau’s calm.
In the sunlight’s prying
her creations are
fantastic as centaurs,
sphinxes and griffins,
unfeasible and even
beastly in the real.
She watches limbs fall off,
decay in the sandspray.
And the cat that cannot coo
whines her awake to where
she might have befriended
a lover or loved a friend.
Oddball collection
She stares sidelong of my eyes
at lunch-out
an earring escaped
stray stress
loss on a wrong day
(Why did it happen with her?)
A scale that loses its balance
I thought my head was tilting
with an ongoing question
(“So you think it will work out with him?”)
And then we are backtracking
between the car and conversation
our eyes sweeping every sideline
a loner reclusive in my purse
(suspicious of witchcraft)
amethyst amulet
some perfectly personal form
bought at Global Village
filigree or sterling spoon-end
retro un-pinched and screwed-off
(the shooting star-eyed friend titters)
at an abysmal drop
parsimonious accounting
the starry-eyed co-worker probes for
and competently dangles
for another day when the profound find
(waits on the carpet at home)
still a Navajo flute player
vanishes from its reflection
the vintage cameo gives up its ghost
a June-blue bead falls
(and all is ephemeral)
oddball collection of
Shakespearean pirate jewelry
perhaps one should wear an earring akimbo
instead of a new pair
(us women)
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