[Polaroid of]
Katie Jean Shinkle | Poetry
the biggest crowd you have ever seen,
row of eyes of trees, squiggle face, no oxygen,
gravity gravitas marshall law
grounds for the taking.
Peanut shells, carbonation, one lane, another,
what a well-placed hug can do.
An allergy is an allergy regardless of X,
the math of it, the expanse.
When I am away from you, what delight,
what fancy, re-strung.
Weight, weight, dent in my bone,
sternum or something
far worse.
Katie Jean Shinkle is the author of four prose novellas and seven chapbooks of both poetry and prose, most recently None of This is an Invitation (coauthored with Jessica Alexander, Astrophil Press at University of South Dakota, forthcoming) and Thick City (Bull City Press, forthcoming). She served as a 2021 poetry fellow at Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices and teaches in the MFA Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing program at Sam Houston State University.
Crowd by David Ragusa