Katherine Northrop poem: Maybe I am Here

 

     Jo Ann Verburg photograph ©2022

Maybe I am here

  

and there you are, sort of, like a row of trophies seen through a picture window, very green-gold, but anymore, Lemon Drop, I am not a woman who can sleep with whomever she wants.  In the house

 

my skin jitters, like a wind picking up across a lake, and I keep opening windows hello? hello? but the sun just sticks, lozenged in trees wind-stripped.  Some days, things

 

look strangely:  a single shoe on the sidewalk or a pot, in sunlight, on a stoop.  Some days nothing will jimmy the vision.  Pop Tart, what I’m trying to say is I saw mountains in the rear-view too, I saw the girl running into the street.  Nightly, headlights move across the neighbor’s field, empty as a nightgown, or they hover, like someone standing with a set of keys.                 

        

                                                                                        -Katherine Northrop

                                                                       originally published in Sugarhouse, vol. 22

Audio recording of the poem here.