The Seer
The chastening face of genius will bite you rather
than see you do something foolish.
Short declarative sentences or swerving intestinal
peregrinations, the message still delivered
with contempt. As though the seer never had to stay home
with the sitter, was never forced
to start over from scratch.
At the gameboard the seer rides a tidal urge to slaughter,
desire towering as strategy comes clear.
Crushed
between their gums like a cumulus of caramel candy popcorn
you’re powdered granular, pathetic
victim of a banal sin.
At Teotihuacán the theocrats made ornate necklaces
of ersatz teeth to hang across the bare chests
of their sacrificial human animals. Almost garlands,
collars featuring whole jawbones full of
carved stone molars, canines, bicuspids of freshwater shell.
Eight jawbone arcs of jeweled faux teeth
strung on gut cords
around each victim’s neck, across his chest,
a brazen gambit
to inflate the sacrificial tally.
The seer discretely conceives the feathered serpent
as a useful fiction
yet what could be better than slavery
for raising the foundation of a pyramid. Meet the seer
under a full moon at the jaguar pedestal, where the entrance
to the National Museum in fifteen centuries will be,
and they’ll auger a last handful
of your fatal mistakes; for starters, how you were
so stupid about water or how you suspended disbelief
even after you knew
exactly why the priests grew fat.
The Storm Replays What Appalling Day / What Appalling Day The Storm Replays
Bring down the angle of the rain
bring the rain down at an angle
so I can see it in the afternoon
at the Hotel Cenobio dei Dogi, whereever
the hell that is, scribbled in my spiral
notebook over Tom’s eco reading tips and coffee
stain that stretches up like a man’s supplicating arm,
his face in profile
open lips giving an effect
of effort
in the instant after speech
in the speech after an instant—
what did he just ask for?
Any indelible has gravitas
like an expressed gene
or the design flaw in a sportscar.
You never really get it, negligence,
till someone’s lying dead.
The body wears a pink bra,
dark pink
almost red, a color never meant
for wearing in the afternoon, on pavement.
Bring down the angle of the rain
so it gets between the lids
so it gets all over evidence our faces.
I (never) told her brother how sorry I was—
how sorry I was I never told her,
Brother.
Kathleen Winter is the author of I will not kick my friends (2018), winner of the Elixir Poetry Prize, and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past, winner of the 2013 Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award. Her poems are forthcoming in New Republic, New American Writing, Crannóg Magazine, Blackbird, Broadsided and Waxwing. She was granted fellowships by Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Brown Foundation at Dora Maar House, James Merrill House, Cill Rialaig Project, and Vermont Studio Center. Her awards include the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Prize, Ralph Johnston Fellowship at the University of Texas's Dobie Paisano Ranch, and Poetry Society of America The Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award. Winter reads for 32 Poems and teaches at Sonoma State.