Desert
Katie Berta | Poetry
The years I cared so much for animals
were the years my care for me
was leaving my body. Athens, Ohio
was full of dead and dying
cats, which I was always putting
my hands on before they ran away.
Then we moved to a barren place.
Each yard fenced with cinder blocks,
the only animal a dead rat I found
floating in our pool. What does this
have to do with me, I kept asking.
Nothing, everyone told me, but
a life without life is no life at all.
I say this while the mourning doves
hoot the beginning notes of 50 Cent’s
“Candy Shop” from the tree
in our backyard. For me, everything
comes back to 2004 or 05. It was all
terrible then, too, but in totally different
ways.
Katie Berta’s debut poetry collection, retribution forthcoming, won the Hollis Summers Prize and was published by Ohio University Press in March. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, The Kenyon Review, Verse Daily, The Cincinnati Review, The Yale Review, The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, and Denver Quarterly, among other magazines. She has received residencies from Millay Arts, Ragdale, and The Hambidge Center, fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and an Iowa Review Award. She is a visiting assistant professor at Oberlin College.