#kathryn smith

[womancorpse]

“The greatest blindness we share, my father and I, is that neither of us know how angry we are. It’s perhaps because I cannot admit my fury that I don’t see what he hides from himself. And he, long practiced in self-deception, doesn’t see my anger either. Whatever passions we feel, we call love.”

The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison

[agirlnamedbone]

Kathryn Smith in Sixth Finch (2023)

[whisperthatruns]

Photos of Pig That Appears to Have Blue Fat beneath Skin Shared on Social Media

O wildest blue. O wild boar scalpeled open, peeled back, let me click you. Let me like until your blue fat glows. O phenomenal mystery, you’re so bright already, o terrible terrific, shot dead so someone could snapshot you. O shareable beast, o trending freak animal, the internet wants to know if I want to know more about pig’s blue innards, to see in the photographs a bloody hand holding back the skin. I want to press my pink finger against your marbled blue bubblegum fat. Oh, how I want that hand to be my hand. O swine, how you bait me, and I cannot touch you, I can only click. O pig that appears, I am also blue, and though my shade is more metaphorical, it’s like you know me, and the internet, it knows me, it says recommended for you:

Kathryn Smith, Self-Portrait with Cephalopod (Milkweed, 2021)

[notmanthelessbutnaturemore]

A Permeable Membrane in the Mutable Cosmos, Kathryn Smith

[whisperthatruns]

Cast Your Cares upon Him

A 25-year-old woman told a witness Saturday she threw her 15-month-old son down 50 feet of a river embankment because the devil told her to do it, according to court documents. ---The Spokesman-Review

Are we fish or birds? If we are born gilled, then surely a winged rebirth awaits us,

no longer earthbound, our animal slits sealed over, sealing out knowledge of what came before. The people who grew from fish

do not remember life in water, the memory of it shed with that life’s scales. So hail mammalian, for we are people now, upright, prisoners to our limbs. Who can blame,

then, the young mother who tossed her child down the embankment so he would know this world

is pain and pain again, is grit and scab. Is gristle. Is obeying another’s voice. Is being forced to throw what we love most to the river and watching him hit rock. No wings, no fins. Only dust. She wanted him to remember

what it’s like to breathe inside something else, that world-before-the- world of the womb. That space where being trapped is the only way we stay alive.

Kathryn Smith, Self-Portrait with Cephalopod (Milkweed, 2021)

[whisperthatruns]

Poem for Trending Tragedy

I am trying to think about the circus collapse. I am trying to think about the kidnapped schoolgirls, the extremist who says they’re his for the selling. I am trying, but celebrity overrides: Look, the young country star held at gunpoint. Look, the Instagram argument, the lip-synch fiasco. Someone else is talking. Someone other than who we thought. Not who ought. I am trying to speak about the convict whose execution went wrong, to parse the name of the chemical cocktail, to recall the names of the dead. I know what I know changes nothing. It augurs nothing---not when the plague, it turns out, was not the plague, and we know this now, and not when the skull on the ocean floor holds tens of thousands of years of answers. The mouse that scurries the floorboards could be an old mouse rejuvenated by a younger mouse’s blood, only to meet the trap. I am trying to remember those miners in Chile, caught miles below the ground, but first I must set my mind on things above, turn my eyes to the clouds (the whence from which my help comes), the internet sky I am told will shelter me from collapse. How many days were they down there? How many miles? It seems longer now, deeper. Years and light years. Imagine the researcher’s proposal, his own doubt as he pondered the tiny needle, as he coined the phrase mouse transfusion. He’d have to ignore so many skeptics, spend so many years paying attention to small creatures, letting the world flicker past, world beset with wars, world too impatient for war, world too impatient for what endures.

Kathryn Smith, Self-Portrait with Cephalopod (Milkweed, 2021)

[whisperthatruns]

Independence Day

We grew up believing in cold heat. Summer days sank to the lake’s dark shiver.

All the girls on the dock pretended it didn’t sting, the gasp of regret as the body

breaks the surface. I would have taken a photograph, but I wanted the chance

to remember things differently---no sunlight cleaving into us the way it did, no faces

unrecognizably shadowed. Once you hit water, nothing was the same. It was

See you next year and Stop by on the 4th. It was shoulders burnt to blister. Never kisses. I ached

for a bathing suit’s just-so pucker, a glimpse of goosefleshed glisten. Barbecue smoke

and fireworks clouded twilight with particulate burn, acrid and unforgiving.

In that tear-inducing suspension, the sulfured air souring my lungs kept me breathing.

Kathryn Smith, Self-Portrait with Cephalopod (Milkweed, 2021)

[fragbot]

to see in the photographs a bloody hand holding back the skin. I want to press my pink finger against your marbled blue bubblegum fat. Oh, how I want that hand to be my hand.

- from "Photos of Pig That Appears to Have Blue Fat Beneath Skin Shared on Social Media," Kathryn Smith