Four poems by Katherine Fallon

My Light Form

Cacophonous ghost tribe of a love,
the moment we met was a reckoning.

That night, I got hungry again,
and sickly so.

I swelled, breathed sheer will
into the drab golem of myself.

Mud-dumb, mindlessly driven,
this time, I ended my own war.

Yaw

Thick as a lamppost, I planted
and kept house for her. Running
water, a dog with a polar bear
pelt. Blanket beneath the ice-chip
stars. But something went wrong. Need
made me unlovely and she retreated.
Summer bedtimes, grasshoppers
thrummed themselves outside,
in the pitch. From them, we learned

to suffer, to care. To stay put and make
noise. Especially when no one asks
to hear it, make noise.
 

Observer

A fly comes from the bulb-less socket
above the shower. Aware of me, wanting
outside, but slow to move, like old or dying.
Nightly, I expect to find it expired, scarab green

corpse poorly lit because I can’t be bothered,
and there I’ll be, buck naked, considering

my own inaction with detachment:
intervention has never yet served me.

Cucurbits

move out over the soil, root
along their vines, constrict

the dense weed base: silk neckties,
which you threaded

through the bed frame
and then around my wrists in summer.

Late crops. Quasi-phalli
in the field soon fallow.