She was a blowsy flower that grew up through a crack in the sidewalk, 
     her skin studded with grit. 
She was a gypsy before saying that was a bad thing,  
     wild hair, bright clothes, dark whiskers curling from her chin. 
She was a scream in the night 	but when we got there, 
     she was the one holding the knife. 
She was a welcome burr on my sock, happy to travel anywhere for free. 
She was the asterisk on every recipe that says: 
     Adjust seasoning to taste. 
She was a cyclist, a pedestrian who never got a driver’s license,  
     which made her dependent and necessarily charming. 
She was a conductor for the Underground Railroad, and she hid me up 
     under her roof. 
She was my passport to another quarter of American life. 
She was a connoisseur of cement statuary we lugged around the county 
     to her yard then mine because the mania is contagious. 
She was a Robin Hood who lined her rooms with books from work 
     because no one at her branch appreciated Martha Stewart. 
Tell me what you want, cookbooks? poetry? 
She was the mystery caller who told me when to dumpster dive. 
She was a kitchen mystic. If you talk bad to the food, it won’t 
     turn out. It will know you’re angry at it. 
She was the Mad Hatter, adopting cats, stealing dishes from 
     the neighbor. 
She was arrested, lost her job. 
She became an exile, baking cookies for friends she never saw. 
She couldn’t stop spending her butter. 
     She became The Pieta. 
		How was I to know? 
She was a witch when she cursed my children, 
     but she was equally the ventriloquist and the dummy then. 
			No one was in control. 
We were chameleons who could no longer turn into each other. 
I stepped off the plaid, but she went crazy there. 
	I am alone. 

Elizabeth Kerlikowske

is one of the founding members of Kalamazoo Writers Disorganization, which presents monthly programs for writers as well as a meeting place. Her most recent chapbook is Falling Women (Etchings Press, 2022), with poems by Kerlikowske and visual art by Mary Hatch. The two are also co-authors of Art Speaks: Paintings and Poetry (Kazoo Books, 2018).

Kerlikowske’s first full-length book of poetry, Dominant Hand, is available from Mayapple Press. She is also the author of The Vaudeville Horse (Etchings Press, 2022), 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, MacQueen’s Quinterly, 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).

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 Issue 11 of MacQ (January 2022); nominated for Best of the Net 2023

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

⚡ Tribute to Mary Hatch, prose poem in MacQ-9 (August 2021)

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