Poems by ky perraun
Here, in this Catholic hospital, with its crucifix
décor and daily contemplation, sparks kiss your temples
and your tongue is tied to the tunes of Mass.
Writer’s Choice
Of Imagination All Compact
Thatcher was, by all accounts and sufferings of everyone who knew him, a genius. On the day he was to write the greatest novel in all eternity…
An Ode to My Shadow
Do you remember that late afternoon when I saw you across the room? I do, you called to me from the Toronto motorcycle trade show floor with your lights and dashing flames.
Gossedel the Wily
El’s house, like her, sat on the fringes of a polite community. Where the town ended and the fields began, a few houses, including El’s, barely remembered how to belong.
Concussed
My eyeballs twitch to blink, they dry out before I remember, staring but not seeing,
To
Blink.
Is This The Place?
The taxi drops me off in front of monumental Victorian gates of stone. The guard hands me a tourist map and
directs me to the genealogy office when I tell him I’m looking for family.
Birthplace
It was the hayloft’s aerial devilry— stench of rot in the heat, barn boards strewn with excrement, swallow and bat, littered with too many winged corpses for a child to revive— that compelled her
Whispers
There are whispers. They call like echoes in empty space, So that we may find a semblance of shapes amongst the darkness. Only here, on the precipice of passing, are we forced with the honest truth. Like rivers, we ebb and coil and stretch far beyond the measure of our bodies.
Motherhood in the Plague Year
Sometime between the murder of George Floyd and the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, I started to think about killing myself.