Hawkmouth

          The body, the animal of me
          doesn’t know that it is lonely in the diner
          all it knows is how to keep itself
          alive, ingeniously, and when I am asked
           “how are you sir”
          the body does not care that I
          am a woman, as long as I am drinking
          something warm
          and as long as the windows outside keep
          pouring their light into the endless
          blue bowl of night.

          So yes of course I’ll
          finish the meal
          and lick clean the oily paper wrapping
          and then eat the paper too —
          why deny a hungry animal
          anything I can give it?

Inheritance

          Driving home the hundred miles in the
          snow your mother says, oh god look
          at that, and you wonder why she felt
          you ought to see the car flipped over
          like a shelled soft old thing useless
          to right itself and you wonder where
          the driver is. Remember when you found
          out all the things your mother has been
          through and you looked at her newly,
          then, seeing in her crow’s feet all the
          times she has been the driver, and all the
          times you might someday be the driver
          hanging upside-down by your seatbelt,
          or not hanging, with the snow coming down.

Katy Bond is a first-year student at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She’s just glad to be here.
NEXT
BACK