Breadth
Kate DeLay | Poetry
The price of living is remembering. For the price
of dying, fattened cows load into truck beds,
their bodies forgotten of my childhood
names. Years thinned until
I could no longer see
where my body met its desire. I sold to America
my heart for pennies. Don’t yet leave me, I said
to my heart. It shined like a penny
worth more copper than a penny.
Kate DeLay is a poet from Tennessee. Her work can be found or forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2023 William Matthews Poetry Prize, selected by Diane Seuss. Kate is Black Warrior Review’s Editor in Chief.