Kristin LaTour 

Late Semester Office Hours, English Professor

My cave, lit by electric fire,
lacks the jagged crack in the rock
spewing noxious gasses, the gray steam
of knowledge.

My chair is not a high tripod—
wood and rope perching me over priests.
I sit low, eye level, upholstered and ergonomic
but no less mysterious for having traded
robes and rolling eyes for slacks and glasses.

Pilgrims come to me bearing their offerings--
they have not had far to come, no swollen bloody knees,
but they pray I will see them either
as they really are—weak and newly born—
or as they see themselves—rulers of small kingdoms.

They expect a spectacle--
my words rolling forth in drugged insight.
Not the words of a mere mortal
but words that demand interpretation
signs scrawled incoherently on the paper handed to me.
I must morph into priestess,
interlocutor and translator.

Who could expect to understand the garbled
grammar of any woman
​without prayer and contemplation?



​​
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Kristin LaTour’s poems are published or forthcoming at Fifth Wednesday, Cider Press, Adanna, qartsilluni, Medulla and Labletter. She has a chapbook forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press titled Agoraphobia.