Fall 2008
friend
my only friend here,
when she speaks, birds go.
i do not understand.
words, her muddle of feathers & soft
mouth.
it is a beautiful fountain. the birds are blue
like the bluest blue thing.
my friend is lovely & she is kind.
together, we refrain from.
tightly we, as syllables, hold the tranquil in.
often, we do not know. but are sturdy
& our hearts.
i would like to make my friend always
in a book of fables. during all tongues
i could—
her story is this in swift pictures:
there is a girl with orchid branch
in her throat & everyday
the birds flutter up
to perch.
they sing so full & then
they burst.
poem
like he kept photo albums in his lungs
he coughed that kind of shredding.
when you heard it,
his hack, as a passer-by
it felt like knives,
like you were the pinned-down
circus girl
& he threw daggers
between your legs.
illness like this (so
obvious), how
the body makes secrets
& spreads them.
Kristin Hatch lives in San Francisco. She graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 2006. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Madison Review, Can We Have Our Ball Back? and Quarterly West.