Cloud Report, 2/1/23

At first, the sky seems cloudless but then I see a sheer veil gliding east. It gathers a body and soon hovers, solid white. A flock of gulls circles and swoops, wings flashing. I want to know if you laugh in your sleep or dream about camping far from cell towers, at what feels like the edge of the world. There’s no one I can ask. Now the cloud dissolves so slowly the sky matches the snow on the roof, which casts a blue-gray shadow. The brittle plumes of the maidenhair grasses tangle and bend beside it.

Cloud Report, 3/4/23

Like a reliable courier, last night’s storm piled snow onto the roof and the porch and the field. Now sun declares everything under powder blue sky. The landscape’s distilled: white, black, gray. A crow perches so long in the far oak it can’t be real. Your voice is thick with sleep when you call, and I should be grateful you survived, car totaled; first you say it slid into the ditch. Then you say you hit two deer. Already, water drips steadily from the sharp edge of the roof. A sundog curves along a cloud that almost fills my window, its striated light—greeny blue that fades to gold—just faint enough to make me question what I see.

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)