Gone
Katie Berta | Poetry
I did many many many
many many boring things.
I sat for a show. I clicked
on a link. I looked over
and over and over your
paper. Come boring myself,
I know what I’ve known:
doing boring is being boring.
(I’ve known since childhood:
taught by the women who’d talk
by listing each of the errands
they’d run) I watch
videos: crushing small balls
of chalk. One blue, one green,
one spilling a certain red. People
say they watch for the sound.
Dust on dust, eyes on eyes,
dirt to dirt—not bored anymore
but dead or, more precisely,
a kind of dead: gone.
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.