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Fall 2015

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The New Day

By Katharine Coles
From the Fall 2015 Issue

Enters in the heroic mode, feathered

And helmeted, muscle-bound

 

For glory, smelling of scorch. Raise

That sword a little higher

 

If you can lift it and buckle your straps

Tight. Insert fanfare. Nobody still

 

Gets to ride the train all afternoon

Dozing. Scotch that clickety-clack, the sudden

 

Dark plunge. In the underworld nobody gets to be

Just a body any more, ripe, a little bloody,

 

And needing its toenails clipped. Me, poor

Me, I’m steeping in juices, greased

 

And gristled. In the past I’ve been pretty

Enough, though, to make up for anything.

 

 

Katharine Coles wrote her fifth poetry collection, The Earth Is Not Flat (Red Hen Press, 2013), under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. Ten poems from the book, translated into German by Klaus Martens, appeared in the Summer 2014 issue of Matrix, and her work is currently being translated into Spanish and Italian. Her sixth book, Flight, is due out from Red Hen in 2016. A professor at the University of Utah, Coles has served as Utah poet laureate (2006–2012) and as the inaugural director of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute (2009–2010).