It can happen at any time. 
Since the couple is in their seventies 
it’s usually afternoon because morning 
is full of phlegm, and at night sleep 
overcomes them at sporadic intervals 
interrupted by commercials. Decades 
of yoga allow her to wrap around his 
trunk like an eel, like ivy, and hang 
on until they are gasping in a knot 
of bedding, at least one cat staring.
They dress efficiently. She sits at 
her computer. He kisses the top 
of her head. They can hardly wait 
to be apart. 

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s

new chapbook is The Vaudeville Horse (Etchings Press, 2022). Her first full-length book of poetry, Dominant Hand, is available from Mayapple Press, and she is co-author with artist Mary Hatch of Art Speaks: Paintings and Poetry (Kazoo Books, 2018). Other books by Kerlikowske include The Shape of Dad (a memoir in prose poems), Last Hula (winner of the 2013 Standing Rock Chapbook Competition), and Chain of Lakes.

She has been publishing her poetry and fiction for more than 40 years in such journals and magazines as Encore, Cincinnati Review, Passager, and Poemeleon, among others. Recent poems have appeared in New Verse News and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily.

Her work is also anthologized in Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Flash Sequence (White Pine Press, 2016); The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women (Shade Mountain Press, 2015); two of the annual KYSO Flash anthologies, Accidents of Light (2018) and Earth Hymn (2019); and in the Michigan writers anthology published by Western Michigan University (WMU).

Formerly an arts activist, Kerlikowske was president of the Poetry Society of Michigan, and she served for 30 years as president of the Kalamazoo Friends of Poetry. She’s retired from a teaching career at Kellogg Community College. Recently, she took a project years in the making to a gallery, and the show opens on 22 August 2023.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ If my grandfather walked toward me with two arms, I wouldn’t recognize him, micro-CNF by Kerlikowske in MacQ-11 (January 2022); nominated in September for Best of the Net 2023

⚡ Into the Oak, prose poem by Kerlikowske in MacQ-9 (August 2021)

⚡ Three in Prose by Kerlikowske in DIAGRAM (Issue 5.1): “Forty Winks,” “The Girls’ Room,” and “Midway”