By Kathryn Wood
There’s no brokenness in me, though brokenness
has been.
Front street, palette knife, no brush no time for precision.
A happy obscure mess is my favorite kind of person—
her loose change clatters to the floor, no mind to pick
it up,
white cloud etching into her world like a blocky splotched
memory of before (and evermore). With this, she walks.
Stairs of the metro down past Boulevard, past
the smashed clay
pots of yesteryear and the scattered pansies of a whirlwind
winter
in development. Her white cloud mind lifting off again
and again, the swirl of an everyday ecstasy she’s been searching
for, the enamel of seashells found spiraling from the
depth
of her ever-opening body into void. Too much saturation
and the black-
point harsh: this, the way she likes it. Take me, she says,
to the Colors
of the world, and they do, take her. Sweep her off
and away
from the street she walks, carrying her on some sort of
chariot
to God’s secret infinitude. And the people on the street
seeing her,
see her. A subtle everyday delight smeared into the spaces
between them,
those bustling bodies, and if angels were real, or nymphs
in present-day,
she’d ride along beside them, singing—
top of her trachea, enchanting, off-key, missed the note
just-right.
How glad she is to be here and gone, how charming
living in the split,
dazzled by a mystery and swathed in a blanket of almost
narcotic
certainly neurotic splendor, elated as a speckled clam.
She is open country air beauty. Stands in a red pillar of polyester
resin, fiberglass and plywood (an art museum);
her hazy reflection drifting
into a forgiving outline of a present self. She thinks
how lovely she is
how marvelous it is to love the way she does, how rich
and wondrous
are all the worlds, and she smiles: (world smiles back.)
Drench me,
she says. As she walks she becomes the rain.
___
Kathryn Wood is a writer and travel nurse currently meandering through a variety of states in the US. She holds Bachelors degrees in English and Women, Gender & Sexuality from the University of Virginia. In addition to poetry, she is editing her book Histrionics, a collection of lyrical prose detailing a solo-trip across the country as a young, promiscuous, and ecstatically troubled woman. Her work also appears in the anthology, Writing Through the Apocalypse (2023), Boston College’s Feminist Anthology, Hoochie (2017), and is soon to appear in Poets Choice (2026). She can be found on Substack: @katbirdword and on Instagram: @katbird.word.