This Is Not the Body
Black fragments braid together.
Small slashes form frothy waves.
Words melt down to dark liquid.
This is not the body
you remember, foreign crevices
where familiar pockets once
lived. Sketch your secrets. Unstitch
your epitaph. Scrawl your anxious
cognitions into existence. String
them along like you did to all those
boys in high school.
After the Party: An Abecedarian Ekphrastic
After Kim Dorland’s “After the Party”
After the party, I stand
beside the steel-gray street,
clutching my phone in the semi-
darkness.
Every moment
from the night’s
gathering swirls through my
head: the
intimate glances, the
joyful grins, the quick
kisses, the stilted
lulls. Now, the moon is
missing. In the
night-blackness, butter-colored
orbs hang, suspended, like glowing
pearls. My heart rate
quickens as a car pulls up the
road.
Soon my body will
take me to bed, slip me
under the sheets and into the
virtual reality of my dreamland.
Where did the years go? I’ve tried to
Xerox all my best moments, but
you escaped me. The vehicle
zooms off. Now I am entirely alone.
All My Best Are Now Broken or Buried
The champagne’s now fizzless and my feelings are dead.
Let’s face it: you were always going to be buried.
Grief is a gift if you know how to uncoil its ribbons.
The truth is, in every last fantasy, our love poem fell flat.
Let’s face it: you were always going to be buried.
I, on the other hand, clawed my way out, damp and desperate
from dreaming. The truth is our love poem fell flat.
Our New Year’s kiss never made it to midnight.
I, however, clawed my way out, damp and desperate.
Did I tell you I once had a hamster named after Amelia Earhart?
Our New Year’s kiss never made it to midnight, nor did
the storm. Eyelids the color of smoke, lips parentheses.
Did I tell you I once had a hamster named after Amelia Earhart?
Now she’s buried in the backyard in a box that my brother carried
during a tempest: fur the color of smoke, eyelids little commas
painted on her face as if she were a baby doll sleeping.
Now she’s buried in the backyard in a box that my brother carried.
Grief is a gift if you know how to uncurl the ribbons
enclosing the box. It is as if she were my beloved sleeping.
The champagne’s now fizzless and my feelings are dead.
Kate Kadleck is a writer and relationship therapist based in Dubuque, Iowa. She earned her MS in marriage and family therapy from Northwestern University and is the author of a chapbook, Corpse Pose (Bottlecap Press, 2025). Kate also has a poetry collection, Not Quite Medusa, forthcoming from Kelsay Books. She is a poetry reader for wildscape. literary journal, and her work can be found or is forthcoming in places such as phoebe, Outskirts Literary Journal, The Turning Leaf Journal, boats against the current, Ivy Literary Journal, Rust & Moth, and Moss Puppy Magazine. Kate was a finalist for Frontier Poetry’s Hurt & Healing Prize as well as Four Tulips’ Fantastic Mischief Contest, and her second chapbook was longlisted for C&R Press’s Winter Soup Bowl Chapbook Awards
The Marbled Sigh 