Letters to Little Katie: Seven Poems
Katherine Fallon
Letter to Little Katie VI
Your body is a hologram that will flicker
differently for every person, a list
you try to make sometimes
while driving, always losing count.
For so long, you’ll have little
practice refusing: her scent good
enough, the romance of rain good
enough, the-hell-of-it good enough.
Finally you’ll learn to go dark.
Until that one—you’ll see—
comes when you say come.
Letter to Little Katie VII
You’ll be watching torture porn—girls’-school-
cum-correctional-facility complete with leather
and machine guns—when you kiss your first girl,
a stranger who’ll live down the street. She will move
like a steel rod runs through her, skull to tailbone.
You won’t ever know what condition made her so
ramrod, upright. You’ll grow up beside each other,
never say one word. You’ll never find the movie again.
Letter to Little Katie VIII
You will love women who get
into fights with men at gas pumps,
who call themselves stone
and keep their nails bitten short.
You will love the kind of human
who does not want to be touched.
Feel the roll of quarters against
your thigh. Have that be enough.
Letter to Little Katie I
You will be flattened by an electric fence
in tall grass plagued with grasshoppers.
Your wife will think for far too long
that your barbed wire scars are stretchmarks.
You will climb a mountain chasing
wayward cattle, unknowingly grab
a baby rattlesnake, photograph endless
roadkill. There will be all kinds of blood
on your hands.
Letter to Little Katie IV
Don’t be afraid of heights
or basements, it’s hype. Fear
instead thresholds, stairwells,
the wide ribs of women,
being told you remind anyone
of their parents.
Letter to Little Katie V
Have no shame in loving
the god damned idiot box,
let it bathe you in green light
at night. These, your childhood
challenges, childhood friends,
guide the eerie way to roads
straight to water.
Letter to Little Katie IX
Watch—really watch—as the snake
unhinges his jaw to take in the wren.
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