Kathleen Winter

Among the Neglects

A bird pierces holes into silence, a damaged organ goes
to oblivion, compelling a lifetime of adjustments.
I’d forgotten you this year, till Firth’s Darcy rode from a lost century
to deliver you to my night vision:  handsomest dead man I ever saw,
sitting in your last living room with friends.
My own body of gum and sap now ambered—an ancient insect
jewels my core in the vitrine’s measured light.
Stilled past harm, it shares dregs of regard with other tongueless wonders.
I divide honey-cake with a silver knife but taste only metal,
recalling how I was assured this outcome is the preferred alternative—
as though a wound could be neutered by one clean adjective.
As though mortality, by being general, becomes tolerable. 

As though mortality were neutered by being general,
as though one tolerable verb could clean the wound.
Recalling how I was assured this outcome is the preferred alternative,
I tasted only metal, dividing honey-cake with a silver knife.
Sharing dregs of regard with other tongueless wonders,
my stilled core:  past harms measured in the vitrine’s light.
Jeweled by an ancient insect, now the gum and sap of my body,
ambered. In the living room with last friends, you’re the dead
handsomest man I ever saw, delivered to my night vision
by Firth’s Darcy, piercing his century. I’d forgotten you this year—
a lifetime of compelled adjustments. An organ goes to silence;
a bird riddles oblivion with holes.

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Kathleen Winter is the author of the collections Transformer, I will not kick my friends and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past. Her chapbook, Cat’s Tongue, was published by Texas Review Press in 2022.  Her work has appeared in The New Republic, The New Statesman, Agni, Cincinnati Review, Descant, Yale Review and The Adroit Journal.  She was granted fellowships by the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Maison Dora Maar, James Merrill House and Cill Rialaig. Awards include the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize, Ralph Johnston Fellowship and Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award. Kathleen teaches creative writing at Sonoma State University and is an associate editor with 32 Poems.