JANUARY BOUQUET

by Katherine Smith

The only antidote for America 

is to go outside in the freezing cold winter

and dream of the most beautiful city on earth

or even this universe (there may not be any other). 

This city is Granada.  Inside my house 

I think only of Minneapolis, of winter.

Outside my house I dream of Grenada and spring

on the slope leading towards the white limestone caves

where the pink dusk hovers over the Alhambra and the Sierra Nevada.

By day I once walked through the summer palace of the kings of Spain.

By night I listened to flamenco and the percussive shoes of dancers.

By day the stained glass of the cathedral blossomed

like the roses in the summer palace. Beauty softened the blow

of the inquisition six hundred years before

just as a memory of joy softens the blow of the shootings,

and the military on the streets of Minneapolis. Nothing 

is more consoling than the dream of a beautiful ruin,

for the ugliness happening to America. I lay memory

like a wreath on the roadside 

where Alex Pretti and Renee Good died.

Katherine Smith’s poetry publications include appearances in Southern Review, Boulevard, North American Review, Ploughshares, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, and many other journals. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. Her third book, Secret City, appeared with Madville Press in 2022. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

YOU ASK WHO I ADMIRE

by Katherine Smith

I admire the bare branches of trees

for reaching into the sky

tinged pink by a winter dawn.

I admire my student for showing up

to class on this cold February morning

after she was evicted from her home

I admire lungs for breathing

the splintered air, bare fingers

for scraping frost.

I admire the baby still attached to her mother

by the umbilical cord

who survived

the earthquake.

I admire the uncle who found the baby

under the rubble.

I admire the father who sobs

my back is broken,

his grief a prayer.

And most of all

I admire the mother brave

enough to give birth

on this brave earth.

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

TREE

by Katherine Smith

Kevin Siers, The Charlotte Observer, NC

The maples scatter their necklaces of seedpods

to the grass. My heart aches

for Texas where yesterday an eighteen-year-old

walked into a school and shot

 

eighteen children, more than one for each year of his life.

Anger spins inside me like wind-torn seeds.

All year long in the classroom I teach my students

to barricade the doors. The children are right

 

to ignore me. They go on chatting

while I point to tables and chairs.

My explanation will do no good

as the faces of congressmen and senators

 

at the NRA convention in Houston

do no good, pledging allegiance

chins up, wooden jaws squared as if relishing

yet another opportunity to stand rooted

 

like dead wood to their murderous cause.

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

BRILLIANT

by Katherine Smith

Bruce MacKinnon editorial cartoon February 10, 2022.

The best moment of my day

happened two hours after

I packed my black puppy into the car

when I screamed yes!

when the guy from triple A turned the key in the jammed lock,

a fine moment for human ingenuity. Twenty minutes later

I was driving down the Beltway behind a thousand trucks, a banquet

of American flags rippled from the empty cabs

of eighteen wheelers, a freightless load

of freedom fluttered in the exhaust filled air.

My puppy whimpered in the back seat.

Horns honked. Don’t tread on me,

in brilliant yellow, the red maple leaf

of Canadians blurred the air. On the overpasses

a few lone bodies waved as the trucks drove under.

I searched for my exit. Put my hand in the back seat to comfort the puppy

headed away from the capitol towards the country.

 

I am afraid of stupidity

whether it is driving an empty truck

around the Beltway at rush hour

to protest a mask mandate

while fuel is 4 and a half dollars a gallon

while people are dying in Ukraine

or a student is crying because she has 85 0000

of student loan debt. I didn’t used to be so judgmental

when I had more stupid of my own

when I fled my friends to meet a lover in Boston

whom they despised for good reason

and ruined my life for a couple of years. No one minds

their own stupid even when it distracts them

from the fact that people are dying. Even when I,

a woman who happens to be perfectly sensible today

looks at the convoy

and knows in her bones

that this is what stupid looks like. I keep driving away.

Maybe brilliance is nothing more than enough

hopeless blindness to kill the world

everywhere for everyone. Still,

when I get out of the car the sweetness

of daffodils spills through the air. So far human ingenuity

hasn’t reached the mountain or the reflection

of the moon in the James River.

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

KNIFE

by Katherine Smith

(Ann Telnaes/The Washington Post)

I asked the apple tree

how can you live, knowing?

and the trees answered

scattering brown fruit for deer.

I asked the field sectioned off with black tarp

how can you live, knowing?

And the grass answered

cracking the sidewalk with green.

I asked the mother

how can you live, knowing?

And she answered

holding her child in her lap.

I asked the smiling family posing

with their guns, how can you live, knowing?

And they offered 

silent smiles glittering like knives.

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

I CHECK THE POLLS AT 5 AM

by Katherine Smith

I rise in the dark to check the last polls,

then wait for light to shine through

 

gold-green leaves before I lace my shoes.

Courage. The sun is shining on the most beautiful

 

leaf, which is dead, and glowing with light.

Everything is metaphor this morning.

 

Even the wind, even my sanity

even the mangled carcass of a groundhog

 

I skirt on the road, whispering please

don’t let it still be there tomorrow.

 

Katherine Smith’s recent poetry publications include appearances in Boulevard, North American Review, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals. Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

by Katherine Smith

Artist: Steve Brodner via Pinterest

On the Senate Majority Leader

The oaks do not aspire
to spirit or imagination,
but grow straight up.
Indifferently

casting their shadows
over the saplings,
they search
for unopposed light
 
to fall from their canopy                       
into the shadowy ridged bark
of withered trees.
So too

there are human beings—
you know their names—
whose principles are limited
to domination and money.

They are called champions,
these proud lucky ones
that kill everything
that lives

beneath them.


Katherine Smith’s publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals.  Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.

ADAM SCROLLS THROUGH HIS APPLE

by Katherine Smith

“‘How do I feel about Trump? I’ll tell you’ he said. He punched up an app and held his phone to display the digits 26, 447.” —"As Suburban Women Turn to Democrats, Many Suburban Men Stand With Trump," The New York Times October 13, 2018

He notes a murder in another zone,
unwraps his turkey sandwich, smiles
at the Dow rising on his phone.

He eats his lunch in his car alone,
this ancestor of SUVs and wiles.
His thumbs flick: murder, bone

saws, Kavenaugh, He grins.
He won that round. Meanwhile
the Dow is rising on his phone

like pride’s origin. Damn right he’s done
well by his kids and wife. The dead guy’s
only some hack for the Washington Post.

The words that Moses wrote on stone,
are numbers he no longer dials,
replaced by the Dow Jones.

Before the apple, there was testosterone
and oil. The price of crude is undefiled
by fingers severed at the knuckle bone,
and the Dow is rising on his phone.

Katherine Smith’s publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and many other journals.  Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.

BLIGHT

by Katherine Smith

I was born for the same journey as the birds,
the poem about the poem, the pure lyric
of the ovenbird in the wood
calling for a mate to end its solitude
from the top of the American chestnut tree.
I learned to distinguish the American chestnut
from the oak chestnut by the serrated edge,
from the beech by the clasp at the hooked tip.
I learned to recognize my kind by its serrated song.

I step into the woods this morning,
chasing the ovenbird, stepping around a pile
of mating dung beetles. Pure lyric
was once mine. I woke this morning

to fungus on the radio: sixty Palestinians
shot at the border the day the embassy opened
in Jerusalem, the president’s Indonesian resort
paid for by China, and the Russian oil company sold
to Qataris to pay off the president for lifting sanctions.

Pure lyric was once my everyday speech.
The ovenbird calls in the tree canopy
of hickory and oak.
All winter I taught writing
to teenagers from Honduras
now scheduled for deportation.

I’m part of a vast experiment
like the Lego experiment
in which people are given Legos
and told to build, then watch
as their creations are destroyed
while their despair is measured
and recorded for eternity.

I fantasize about what I’d do
if an ICE officer came to the classroom door.
The sweeps never happen
where I can see them.
One by one my students—
Transito, Luis, Fernanda—
will be dropped off at the border
with their English composition skills,
their aspirations and their associates degrees.

Now it’s May and I’m mildly depressed.
Pure lyric hasn’t been my style for twenty years.
The ovenbird calls deliriously from the top
of the American Chestnut tree.

Katherine Smith’s publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals.  Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.

SNOT

by Katherine Smith

President Donald Trump stood alongside House Republicans in the Rose Garden Thursday to applaud the narrow passage of legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare. The bill, also known as the American Health Care Act, aims to effectively gut health care coverage for millions, cut Medicaid funding by 25 percent, and allow states to deny coverage for a slew of pre-existing conditions. —Mother Jones, May 4, 2017

Suspended in the blue horizon like a pale blue sea creature
we sing.  We sing of crown vetch rising from ditches like a minor god
that will still be here in a billion years, a music
we make each day. We believe in our solidity
like sea creatures under the ocean
in their geometric palaces made entirely of mucus,
whirling shells, transparent rooms that filter water
to feed pinkie sized larva. We build our cathedrals,
in love with monuments, marble columns,
the Nautilus of our constitution. In the Rose Garden
Americans have dragged a palace from under the water—
two children sleeping under a blanket on a beach
tended by a woman with a brain tumor who will die in a week—
heaved it onto the thorns, drip under collapsed walls.

Katherine Smith’s publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals.  Her short fiction has appeared in Fiction International and Gargoyle. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. She teaches at Montgomery College in Maryland.

DOMESTIC GODDESS

by Katherine Smith

I do my best to ignore the news
vacuuming carpets, scrubbing goo
from microwave and screen.
I polish floors, un-tarnish green

copper tea kettles, pots that gleam.
I pay the bills, and bake a cake,
greet some evangelists, even take
a pamphlet from their little boy.

Though I’m a Jew and they are goy,
I wish the family Easter joy.
They spread across the neighborhood
this day that I devote to chores.

They preach good news from door to door
this Sunday the cable journalists
report to work, for T***p has pissed
off in a single week, the globe

from loving pope to xenophobe,
Syria, Russia, Britain, North Korea,
Christian, Jew, Sunni, Shia.
While North Korea serenades

an anniversary with grim parades
of weapons, and democracy devolves,
T***p relaxes with a game of golf.
I cook and clean with half my ego

adrift through Seoul, Aleppo, Mar-a-lago.

Katherine Smith’s previous publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. My second book Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014.

THE WEEKEND AFTER

by Katherine Smith





The quiet of the street’s
Unbroken, except for
The intermittent roar

Of leaf-blowers beneath
The maple trees next door,
The sound of aluminum

Bats struck against a ball.
The shouting near the school
Not far from where I live

Grows louder as I walk
Towards it, past the park.
The light this afternoon

Filters through crimson rain
Of walnut leaves to chips
Of bark beneath the slide,

Merry-go-round and swing.
A sheepdog with my Thai
Neighbor passes by, and he

Scoots his dog’s white rump
To mulch beside the curb
So I can pass. In DC

The protests have begun
And a cold front moves
If not through autumn sky,

Quite yet, then through the hearts
That thump within the half
Of us like a blade. I think

Of the writing prompt,
Abandoned for a walk,
That asked us poets to devise

A proper response to one
The history books will call
Winner. But here I pause

To watch a team of girls
At the softball pitch,
A group of dads, who coach

The way to swing a bat.
I contemplate the courage,
Dignity, and grace,

The beauty, human, flawed,
Of course, as all beauty is,
Thrown towards us like a ball

We couldn’t catch.

Katherine Smith’s previous publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review and many other journals. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press) appeared in 2014.

READING HOUELLEBECQ THE NIGHT BEFORE EARLY VOTING BEGIINS

by Katherine Smith

If this emptiness were all that was left
I would spend the rest of my life reading
paranoid fantasies late into the night.

Instead of going out early to see the leaves
of the cherry trees turn a creamy peach
I would read every night till three the words of the hero

who rarely stepped out of the Sixth Arrondissement
of Paris, a place I happen to know quite well.
I would drink cocoa and fall under the spell of a clash

between fascists and the Muslim Brotherhood
the critics call satire. But I’m pretty sure
the writer believes far more in his dark story

of veiled women, cowardly professors, conspiracies,
than he believes in me, his American reader,
a middle-aged woman in the suburbs. This morning

I regret losing myself in his tale. Dew has already dried
from the late blooming roses. My face sags. I shower,
and accept that my thoughts are unlikely

to persuade anyone. Dependably sane
and despicably naïve, I start my car, drive
to the Frederick Senior Citizens’ Center

to cast my ballot during early voting.

Katherine Smith’s previous publications include appearances in Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003; her second Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press, appeared in 2014.