Audio: Read by the author.
[Heraclitus]
This is not a tragedy / it does not satisfy
the unities of action / or time or place Aristotle
would say this is / incomplete in the whole
& on the whole / I would agree this is
not your tragedy this is / a scrap a slip a fragment
a swatch of fabric cut / off the roll laid against
the old pillow to see how / it becomes your coloring
or the shades of the room / window shades down
other shades hovering / this is a snippet a snag
a snapshot Barthes’s / what has been & is
no more this does / not satisfy a poetics
it’s too ordinary not the / ordinary of comfort food
the ordinary of sand / in your teeth each
grain of dead quartz / helical when a hurricane
hits after midnight / & it’s no longer the day
it was but has become / another morning mourning
we are carried through / the gulf sand clings
disrupts what could be said / of location & when
the question / Is this pretend?
compose decompose / recompose
one day the red chair / one day the garden one day
only the lilies still bloom / they are made of silk
Kate Bolton Bonnici grew up in Alabama and is a graduate of Harvard, NYU Law, UC Riverside, and UCLA. Her poetry collection, Night Burial, won the 2020 Colorado Prize for Poetry. She teaches at UCLA.
