Kathy Goodkin

Cynefin

                                          
Water drips from the bar ceiling onto my wrist and evaporates.
I’m a grey satellite in the rings around my drink.

It’s an accident of time, or timing.
The city feigns tectonic, but it never really moves

I left and came back in June.
I thought it was an accident of time, or timing.

Two years of absence should have been denoted
in a building gone or altered, a new field,

a new hopscotch chalked on the walk.
As ever doesn’t make me think about permanence,

it makes me think of distance. How sameness pushes the mind away.
I leave and come back and nothing’s changed.

This place has the shape of a place shaped place. I’m lying
on the table. I’m caught in a constellation of boat lights on the lake.

The bats in the humid courtyard at home fly away.
I’m stuck on the same plodding bus, always late,

but thrilled to see the pigeons scatter when it rains.
There’s a new piece of paper caught in the fence. No,

it’s the same. I saw it from the window when the bus pulled away.
There’s only one blue scrap; the wind just moves it really fast.
​

---

Sleep Paralysis

This nothing landscape pulls last night’s dreams
from my head like strings of beads.
Craters, blurred. Rocking chair, mocking bird,
where have I heard this before?
My attention to detail wavers. I can’t think a thought
without the word walking, or the word caught.
Bats in the basement maintenance room;
I saw them through a window in the parking lot.
Some spice in the air or a small explosion.
Something happened in your car.
There was a brown overcoat, and a crowbar.
Nothing lasts forever, and even so.
Nothing feels as good as always not having you.


 

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Kathy Goodkin holds an MFA from George Mason University, where she was the recipient of an Academy of American Poets prize. Her poems have previously appeared or are forthcoming in Fourteen Hills, RHINO, and wicked alice. Kathy lives in Denver, directs the Writing Center at Regis University, and loves the mountains.