Kristen McHenry is a resident of Seattle, Washington and is a poet and freelancer by night, and health outreach worker by day. Among other publications, her work has been seen in Wanderings, Breadcrumb Scabs, Boston Literary Magazine, Tiferet, Sybil's Garage, Big Pulp, and several anthologies. She was a  top five finalist in the 2009 national poetry competition “Project Verse”. Her chapbook “The Goatfish Alphabet” was runner-up in qarrtsiluni's 2009 chapbook contest, and was recently published by Naissance Press. Kristen reads for Literary Bohemian, and is the creator and facilitator of the Poet's Cafe, a weekly poetry workshop for homeless teens at the New Horizons drop-in center in downtown Seattle. Kristen lives in the Ballard neighborhood with two cats, two firebellied toads, and one husband. She loves to sing, but only in the car with all of the windows rolled up.

 

In the days when I loved you I kept you in oranges and fiction.
My ribs an arid basket, I had no real offerings.
I opened every hollow in me for your anguish,
more immeasurable even than my own.

I dreamed of us in water. I dreamed I pressed
your jaundiced skin in that spot that always calmed you.
I dreamed that you were desolate. No force was force enough.
Over time, my hands were weakened. Over time

my hands released. In the days when I loved you, I made
myself your patron saint: You the brightest, most
breakable one. You, the only one among us
with eyes glass-green and deep as trees.

The days that I loved you were the days that I believed
there was a cure curled up inside my palms. I believed
in merely clapping--in the white, bedraggled forces
of happenstance and will. I certainly believed

in getting better then. In the days that I loved you
I would awaken, grieving with the memory of guilt:
When you were tiny and I was ten and slapped
your face for spitting out the medicine I fed you.

 

Copyright 2011 Kristen McHenry

title photography by Rachel Ericson