Kathryn Kruse
I Know That There Is a Tear In My Sheet.
This great plane of fabric. Sheet. Then it tears. Shock. Shocking. A rip, not a hole but a rip, in the fabric of night. The sky. The universe beneath me. Sundered. Asundered. All the small language of everyday, corners, smooth, all the little words of getting through, alarm, pleat, of the basic needs, all the amazement that we have enough to clothe even our bed, to clothe our floors and sofas and pillows and even, even our beds, and then amazement and wonder because the sheet has torn. It tears. It rends, pulls apart, breaks the weave. How are sheets of cotton made? Once my sheet grew on the end of a stick coming out of the dirt. Dirt on one end. My sheet on the other. Here it is. A sheet run all over with the patterned outlines of plants and stems and single leaves and clumps of leaves or maybe those are blossoms or maybe those plants where the leaves are sometimes also the blossoms and it has broken open, torn. And the world, all full of sweet smells and bitter, emanates from the tear. The tear in the sheet.
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Kathryn Kruse is the director of Residency on the Farm, an interdisciplinary artists’ residency program. Her fiction collection, To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying and Alone, came out in February, 2025 from JackLeg Press. After sojourns around the world and the US, she now lives and teaches back near the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago.
Kathryn Kruse is the director of Residency on the Farm, an interdisciplinary artists’ residency program. Her fiction collection, To Receive My Services You Must Be Dying and Alone, came out in February, 2025 from JackLeg Press. After sojourns around the world and the US, she now lives and teaches back near the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago.