Love, I would not feed my blood to your poppies, even if you asked me to care for them specially while you were gone. I would not swallow the moon and its trail of earwigs to orbit inside me, just for the luxury of feeling something move. I’ve already been cut open and stapled back up again, twice, while you cradled the bundle in your arms. There’s no need to feed my heart to a snake in exchange for any kind of knowledge. Notice I didn’t say apple or plum, though I easily could have. I’m just being practical here: how many years have I washed our sheets? Remember when we thought love couldn’t hurt us? Now we’ve released them, gorged on it, into an indifferent world. I need all my strength for what comes next.

Kathleen McGookey

is the author of four books of prose poems and three chapbooks, most recently Instructions for My Imposter (Press 53) and Nineteen Letters (BatCat Press). She is also the author of Heart in a Jar (White Pine Press, 2017), Stay (Press 53, 2015), October Again (Burnside Review Press, 2012), and Whatever Shines (White Pine Press, 2001). In 2011, Parlor Press published We’ll See, a book of her translations of contemporary French poet Georges Godeau’s prose poems.

Her poems, prose poems, and translations have appeared in more than 50 literary venues, including among others: Boston Review, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, December, Denver Quarterly, Epoch, Field, Glassworks, Indiana Review, Miramar, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Quiddity, Quarterly West, Rhino, Seneca Review, Sweet, The Antioch Review, The Laurel Review, West Branch, and Willow Springs—and in these anthologies published by White Pine Press: Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence (2016), The Best of the Prose Poem: An International Journal (2000), The House of Your Dream: An International Collection of Prose Poetry (2008), and The Party Train: A Collection of North American Prose Poetry (1996).

Ms. McGookey has received grants from the Irving S. Gilmore Foundation, the Arts Fund of Kalamazoo County, the Sustainable Arts Foundation (2014), and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She has taught creative writing at Hope College, Interlochen Arts Academy, and Western Michigan University.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ “I Couldn’t Look Away”: A Conversation with Kathleen McGookey by David Nilsen in On the Seawall (22 September 2020)

⚡ Sandra Arnold Interviews Kathleen McGookey in New Flash Fiction Review (ca. 2018), about her work in the W. W. Norton anthology New Micro (2018)