Current
Issue
Volume 12.1
Katharine Whitcomb
—
November Ars Poetica
A broken cloud bank above,
black coffee scalding my fingers on
the ceramic cup, I yawn
in dawn-light when a fox
enters the clearing, bright
fox pausing &
gone, loping through my loneliness,
hop-running on her hunting rounds.
I have this obsession w/
juxtapositions: the neighbor’s saw-whine
kicking aside birdsong,
locked rooms of interiority
mashing up against
November forest, dark &
open, leaves down,
paths exposed between thickets
quilled w/ dead overgrowth,
rain-pools in the dirt. These
splashes on my pantlegs stain like spilled
tea, tears for the year. But
you, reader, always there, my
vaguely-drawn companion, my
wild life, my secret whisperer
extraordinaire, tell me, can
you see the vixen
zeroing in on a whiskery vole?
Katharine Whitcomb is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including Habitats, published in January 2024 by Poetry NW Editions in the Possession Sound Series, Saints of South Dakota & Other Poems, which won the Bluestem Award, chosen by Lucia Perillo, and The Daughter’s Almanac, which won the Backwaters Prize, chosen by Patricia Smith. She was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and is the recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and elsewhere. Her work has been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize, a Loft-McKnight Award, and the Nebraska Review Award in Poetry. Her poems and prose have been published in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Bennington Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, terrain.org, and many other journals and anthologies. She is a Distinguished Professor at Central Washington University and makes her home in northern Vermont.
